index
indexA quantitative social, economic, or political measure, often a weighted combination of a number of selected individual indicators for the domain of interest. One example is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's uniform crime index for the USA. Many countries have some kind of retail prices index which measures the rate of inflation in consumer goods. Indexes usually employ standardization to facilitate comparisons, for example showing the initial year of the time-series as base 100, or using the national figure as base 100 for presenting sub-national figures—as illustrated by standard mortality rates.
While these and many other simple indices are useful to sociologists interested in studying trends via longitudinal analysis, other more complex indices are of dubious utility, including (for example) the many available indices of
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