Disease and Disadvantage in the United States and in England

Banks, James; Marmot, Michael; Oldfield, Zoé; Smith, James P.

doi:10.1001/jama.295.17.2037

Cited by 665 publications

(582 citation statements)

References 20 publications

(19 reference statements)

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“…If that is correct, the absolute income argument finds support over the relative one in the US context. Many studies (Banks, Marmot, Oldfield, & Smith, 2006Subramanian & Kawachi, 2006) show, however, that inequality affects the majority of the population. These two points are not necessarily incompatible: in fact, I argue that inequality and poverty can be distinguished but are interdependent, and their effects can rule each other out (as among the US states), or coexist and interact (as across countries), depending on the context and the particular shapes that inequalities assumes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recalibrating the spirit level: An analysis of the interaction of income inequality and poverty and its effect on health

Rambotti

2015

Social Science & Medicine

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The publication of The Spirit Level (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009) marked a paramount moment in the analysis of health and inequality, quickly attracting a remarkable degree of attention, both positive and negative, both in academic and in public discourse. Following at least 20 years of research, the book proposes a simple and powerful argument: inequality per se, more specifically income inequality, is harmful to every aspect of social life. In order to confirm this idea, the authors present a series of bivariate, cross-sectional associations showing comparisons across countries and within the United States. Despite the methodological limitations of this approach, the authors advance causal claims concerning the detrimental effects of income inequality. They also rule out poverty as a plausible alternative explanation, without directly measuring it.Meanwhile, over the last decade stratification scholars have demonstrated the nonlinear effect of economic factors, especially income, on health. The results suggest that a relative approach is best for analyzing dynamics at the top of the income distribution, whereas an absolute approach seems most appropriate for studying the bottom of the distribution.Consistent with this perspective, here I reanalyze data from The Spirit Level, adding a measure of poverty, in order to control the effect of inequality and explore its interaction with poverty. The findings show that inequality and poverty-which I contend are two interdependent but nonetheless distinct phenomena-interact across countries, such that the detrimental effects of inequality are present or stronger in countries with high poverty, and absent or weaker in countries with low poverty; poverty replaces inequality as the favored explanation of health and social ills across states. The new evidence suggests that income distributions are characterized by a complex interplay between inequality and poverty, whose interaction deserves further analysis.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recalibrating the spirit level: An analysis of the interaction of income inequality and poverty and its effect on health

Rambotti

2015

Social Science & Medicine

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“…A large corpus of research shows that low SES is strongly related to morbidity, mortality and biological risk factors (Backlund, Sorlie & Johnson, 1999;Banks, Marmot, Oldfield & Smith, 2006;Braveman, Cubbin, Egerter, Chideya, Marchi, Metzler, 2005;Fritzell & Lundberg, 2007;Seeman, Merkin, Crimmins, Koretz, Charette & Karlamangla, 2008;Shishehbor, Litaker, Pothier & Lauer, 2006).…”

Section: Ses Sleep Problems and Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and socio-economic patterning of self-reported sleep problems in Britain

Arber¹,

Bote²,

Meadows³

2009

Social Science & Medicine

239

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“…In recent papers, we have used data from these surveys to demonstrate that middleaged and older Americans are substantially less healthy than their English counterparts, across a range of important illnesses (Banks et al, 2006;Banks, Muriel, and Smith, 2010). In the same research, we highlighted a substantial socioeconomic gradient in health in both countries, a gradient which is present whether education, income, or financial wealth is used as a measure of socioeconomic status (SES).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Attrition and Health in Ageing Studies: Evidence from ELSA and HRS

2010

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These new ageing studies, which share a comparable template, provide rich sources of information for researchers interested in the dynamics of health, socioeconomic status, retirement, and wellbeing among ageing populations. Their panel nature allows us to investigate the nature and determinants of within-person and within-household experiences in retirement and health onsets, and the manner in which these central life domains co-relate. There are now more than 25 countries in the world who have initiated such comparable longitudinal ageing studies and more countries are certainly on the way.An important concern with all panel studies, and particularly those focused on an older population, is the potential for bias caused by individuals non-randomly dropping out of the survey over time. If attrition from a survey is systematically related to outcomes of interest or to variables correlated with these outcomes, then not only will the survey cease to be representative of the population of interest, but estimates of the relationships between different key outcomes, especially in a longitudinal context, may also be biased.The issue of non-response in longitudinal surveys-both initial non-response and subsequent attrition-has a distinguished history in survey research and statistics (Sudman and Bradburn, 1974, Groves and Couper, 1998, Little and Rubin, 1987. Most of the existing literature has focused on non-ageing panels in the United States, especially during earlier time periods when attrition rates typically were considerably lower (Becketti et al., 1988;Fitzgerald et al., 1998;Lillard and Panis, 1998; Zapel, 1998).In this paper we present results of an investigation into observable characteristics associated with attrition in ELSA and the HRS, with a particular focus on whether attrition is systematically related to health outcomes and socioeconomic status (SES) links between health and SES is one of the primary goals of the ELSA and HRS, so attrition correlated with these outcomes is a critical concern.We begin by looking at raw rates of attrition in the two surveys, and show that panel attrition is a far greater problem in ELSA than in HRS. We consider several possible explanations for ELSA's poorer retention rates, including the greater 'maturity' of HRS (which has been running for ten years longer than ELSA), differences in sampling rules and procedures used in the two surveys, the 'quality' of the two respective survey organizations, and differences in incentives offered to respondents. We conclude that none of these explanations alone or together seems sufficient to account for the disparity in attrition rates between the two surveys.Having documented raw attrition rates in ELSA and HRS, we then consider the possible bias such attrition could introduce into estimates of disease prevalence derived from the two surveys. In recent papers, we have used data from these surveys to demonstrate that middleaged and older Americans are substantially less healthy than their English counterparts, across a range of impo...

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Disease and Disadvantage in the United States and in England

Abstract: Based on self-reported illnesses and biological markers of disease, US residents are much less healthy than their English counterparts and these differences exist at all points of the SES distribution.

Cited by 665 publications

References 20 publications

Recalibrating the spirit level: An analysis of the interaction of income inequality and poverty and its effect on health

Recalibrating the spirit level: An analysis of the interaction of income inequality and poverty and its effect on health

Gender and socio-economic patterning of self-reported sleep problems in Britain

Attrition and Health in Ageing Studies: Evidence from ELSA and HRS

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