Index of active participation in society

Abstract

The concept of Active citizenship is gaining importance. Ignoring the issues of selection of dimensions and items, the paper addresses methodological issues and aggregation of indicators of multidimensional active participation index (PI) by two methods. Policy makers and researchers can take advantages of the proposed methods of arithmetic aggregation (Method-1) with normally distributed transformed scores or multiplicative aggregation (Method-2) without scaling and choosing weights. Thus, the Method-2 avoids the problems of rank robustness specific to selection of weights. Multiplicative aggregation proposed in Method-2 can be converted to additive model by taking logarithms. Normal distributions of two or more groups by Method-1 are likely to give rise to lower value of Ginis coefficient indicating equality. Avoiding major limitations of ordinal scores, both methods satisfy desired properties, analysis under parametric set up for meaningful comparisons including testing of statistical hypothesis, identification of critical dimensions, ranking of the dimensions by elasticity, assessment of progress/decline of PI, etc. Method-2 offers more generalized approach satisfying time reversal test and formation of chain indices. However, test of normality is required for this method unlike the Method-1 which ensures normally distributed scores.