Construction of an environmental quality index for public health research

Table 7 Overall and RUCC-stratified loadings for select variables in the water domain

Constructs indented	Metropolitan - urbanized	Non-metro urbanized	Less-urbanized	Thinly populated	Overall
	(RUCC1 = 1089)	(RUCC2 = 323)	(RUCC 3 = 1059)	(RUCC4 = 670)	(n = 3141)
Water Domain
Overall water quality
% of stream length impaired in county	0.0078	0.0063	−0.0067	−0.0172	0.0031
General water contamination
Industrial permits	−0.0214	−0.0394	−0.0078	0.0084	−0.0114
Recreational water quality
# of days of beach closure	−0.0019	−0.0072	0.0085	0.0092	0
Domestic use water quality
% Population which is on surface water supply	0.0190	0.0175	0.0098	0.0346	0.0220
Atmospheric deposition
Calcium (Ca) precipitation weighted mean	0.0325	0.0179	0.0231	−0.0055	0.0154
Total Mercury (Hg) deposition	−0.0413	−0.0359	−0.0293	0.0072	−0.0228
Drought
% of county drought – extreme (D3-D4)	0.0035	0.0337	0.0234	0.0242	0.0164
Chemical contamination
Selenium	0.1123	0.1196	0.1044	0.1071	0.1103
Silvex	0.1217	0.1209	0.1204	0.1270	0.1226
Chlordane	0.1314	0.1344	0.1343	0.1346	0.1336
1,2-Dichloropropane	0.1451	0.1452	0.1512	0.1461	0.1473
Alpha Particles	0.0620	0.0794	0.0703	0.0704	0.0691

ISSN: 1476-069X