Introduction:

Individuals in positions of socio-economic disadvantage are at increased risk for diseases. In Cuba, the social sciences research on social inequity from different approaches, in which prevail the qualitative techniques with little disclosure of quantitative methods that allow the location of inequalities.

Objective:

To propose a procedure for measuring social inequalities in health in the Cuban context with the use of quantitative methods.

Methods:

Bibliographical review on the techniques and their fundamentals.

The methods were compared according to the methodological challenges, the structure of the entry information, advantages and limiting factors, interpretation of the results, possibility to capture inequality, and software available for each technique. There were proposed stages for measuring the social inequalities in health according with the comparison made, the methodological challenges posed in the researches, the methodological alternatives proposed and the expertise of the researchers.

Conclusions:

Among the limitations of the classical methods is the need to have data up to the minimum level of analysis. Grouping has as methodological challenge the design of a removal of features. Multilevel analysis assumes that the contextual effects are the same for all individuals within groups over time. This difficulty is solved by the analysis of social scripts. The requirement of longitudinal data is the biggest handicap of this technique for its use in Cuba.

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