TABLE 3.

Research areas emanating from the study.

Research area	Research interests
Income	Expenditure was utilised as a proxy to income in this study because the question pertaining to income in the WOPC questionnaire was scarcely reported. This could likely be because of the respondents not wanting to disclose their actual income to government as they may feel that they will be denied government grants if they state an income that is too high, or that they may be feeling a sense of inferiority and were afraid of the enumerator's perception of their response and thus avoided the question. However expenditure does not provide the actual earnings of the individuals in the households that were surveyed and would need to be cross-tabulated against household's income. Thus, a national study that does not place focus on poverty only, such as an investigation into poverty and eye health study, can help to elicit responses on income (in categories), without the fear of respondents being afraid to declare their earnings.
Inequality	Considering the high rates of unemployment, poverty and inequality in South Africa, especially within race and specifically on the African population, it is imperative that further studies be conducted to investigate the rate of inequality with regard to income, in the African population and within the different historical racial categories.Furthermore, despite advances in areas such as electrification and access to education that have increased equality of opportunities, more research is needed to determine what other opportunities (social, economic and health) have increased in terms of equality. Specifically, studies that investigate inequality in access to opportunities that improve eye health should be carried out.
Migration patterns	Leibbrandt et al. (2010) indicate that the urban population increased, thus causing an increase in the number of urban poor, and consequently a decrease in the number of rural poor people. The migration patterns need to be more closely studied to determine the push and pull factors for this migration pattern and the reasons for increased poverty in urban areas. Studies are therefore needed to investigate poverty in the urban areas and the subsequent, if any, impacts on eye health.
Eye health services	The study suggested that those with health needs have a higher percentage of vision impairment compared to other needs such as social, education and documentations. Lack of health services in general, could be indicative of the lack of access to eye care services for affected individuals and communities. An investigation needs to be conducted on the barriers that poor people face with regards to access to eye health services.
Gender and access to eye health services
Household priorities and eye health	In this study, household size was a significant factor in the self-reporting of vision impairment. An assumption of the authors are that larger houses mean that there are lesser resources or that limited resources for poor people need to be prioritised before eye health; thus vision problems are less of a priority and remain untreated. However, further investigation on the association between household size, household priorities and eye health need to be carried out to verify this assumption.
Vision difficulties in children