Indian Journal of Forensic and Community Medicine 2023;10(2):99–101 Content available at: https://www.ipinnovative.com/open-access-journals Indian Journal of Forensic and Community Medicine Journal homepage: https://www.ijfcm.org/ Short Communication Economic parameter of modified Kuppuswamy socioeconomic status scale for the year 2023 Shifana Ayoub 1, *, Rameez Raja 2 1 Dept. of Community Medicine, Government Medical College Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir, India 2 Dept. of Commerce & Management Studies, Government Degree College For Women, Anantnag, Jammu & Kashmir, India ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 05-05-2023 Accepted 04-07-2023 Available online 25-07-2023 Keywords: Social class Family Income Occupation Education Consumer price index ABSTRACT Socioeconomic status SES is one of the most important indicators to consider when assessing a family’s health and nutritional status. It is a position that any person can achieve within a hierarchical social framework. Academicians and medical researchers have made several attempts in the past to create a collection of composite indices to assess an individual’s or a family’s socioeconomic status (SES) whether they reside in a rural or urban location. The Hollingshead, Nakao, and Treas, Blishen, Carroll, and Moore, Tiwari, Kumar, and Agarwal, Jalota, and Kuppuswamy scales are a few of the notable scales. The scales have several factors that account for information about a person or a family. Among all the SES, the most widely used scale in India is ‘The Modified Kuppuswamy SES’. Based on the total score of the Kuppuswamy scale, which ranges from 3-29, families are categorized into five classes, from upper class to lower class. Owing to constraints, the Kuppuswamy SES requires frequent updates for income levels that are dependent on shifting consumer price index (CPI) values, making the scale susceptible to changes over time. This paper aims to update and provide an “Updated Modified Kuppuswamy SES" for the year 2023. This is an Open Access (OA) journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. For reprints contact: reprint@ipinnovative.com 1. Introduction The term socioeconomic status (SES) refers to the position that a person or family has in relation to the community’s typical standards for cultural and material goods, income, and involvement in social activities. 1 It is a crucial factor in determining an individual’s nutritional status, mortality, and morbidity since it affects the cost, acceptability, accessibility, and use of medical facilities. The disparities between socioeconomic position (SES) and health status follow a gradient, or a step-by-step pattern, between where one sits in an SES hierarchy and most health outcomes. Even though not all health issues are correlated with socioeconomic class (a few diseases are more common in higher SES groups than in lower SES groups), the tendency * Corresponding author. E-mail address: shifanaayoub94@gmail.com (S. Ayoub). is persistent throughout time and is evident in both men and women of all ages across countries. However, recent studies have demonstrated that health disparities accumulate over a lifetime and have an impact on health at every stage of life. Poor social and economic circumstances early in life have a long-term effect on health. 2 Several socioeconomic status scales have been proposed in India for both urban and rural areas. The noteworthy include the Rahudkar scale (1960); B.J. Prasad (1961); Udai Parikh (1964); Jalota scale (1970); Kulshreshta scale (1972); Modified Kuppuswamy scale (1976); Shrivastava scale (1978); Bhardwaj scale (2001) & O. P. Aggarwal (2005). 3 The criteria that are most frequently utilized in these scales are total income, educational achievement, and occupation. In India, the most well-known and extensively used scale for determining the socioeconomic status of an individual or a family in urban areas is the "Modified Kuppuswamy SES Scale". 4 https://doi.org/10.18231/j.ijfcm.2023.017 2394-6768/© 2023 Innovative Publication, All rights reserved. 99