Material versus social deprivation and health: a case study of an urban area

Abstract

Socioeconomic factors are one of the main determinants of health inequalities. However, which component of socioeconomic status affects health most and how that relationship should be measured remains an open question. The aim of this study was to compare material and social deprivation indexes in order to determine which better explains health inequalities within an urban area. Following a review of the literature on small area deprivation indexes, a case study of the Italian city Genoa is presented. The city of Genoa is split into 71 small areas [urbanistic units (UU)], each of which has about 9,500 inhabitants. For each small area, socioeconomic indicators were extracted from the 2001 Census, whereas health indicators were computed from the death registry for 2001-2003. Factorial analyses was used to choose the deprivation variables, which were utilised to create two distinct deprivation indexes referring to material and social deprivation, respectively. Both deprivation indexes are positively correlated with health status proxied by standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) under 65. The material index, however, correlates more highly with SMRs than the social index, and thus the material index is the more suitable measure to explain variations in premature mortality within an urban area. Moreover, the two indexes must be kept distinct.

Material Deprivation Affects High Sexual Risk Behavior among Young People in Urban Slums, South Africa

“…This finding contradicts the notion that deprivation, being a function of shortage in financial capital, should be a more proximate indicator of risk than income. 24,32 Disparities in findings might be a result of the lack of data for measuring financial difficulty in the LoveLife data set, an important limitation.…”

“…Several studies on high-income countries have found a strong association between material deprivation and health behavior. 17,[21][22][23][24] However, there is no consensus to date on what constitutes material deprivation and the research output on such relationships on low-income countries is relatively limited. Moreover, Burns and Snow 19 argue that commonly used constructs of deprivation in high-income countries do not adequately represent the conditions and realities of low-income countries.…”

Deprivazione materiale e sociale nelle regioni italiane: una analisi attraverso l'elaborazione di indicatori sociali

“…La deprivazione, essendo uno "stato di svantaggio" degli individui che vivono in un certo territorio, può essere analizzata sotto un duplice aspetto: la deprivazione materiale comporta la mancanza di beni, servizi, risorse, comodità normalmente godute o almeno largamente accettate come beni primari (Testi e Ivaldi, 2009). La deprivazione sociale, d'altro canto, sottende ad una non partecipazione nei ruoli, relazioni, usi, funzioni, diritti e responsabilità implicati dall'essere membro di una data società o di un suo sotto gruppo (Townsend, 1987;Townsend et al, 1988).…”

Regionale Deprivation und Mortalität in Bayern. Entwicklung eines ,Index Multipler Deprivation‘ auf Gemeindeebene

“…B. Frankreich [ 34 ] , Italien [ 35 ] , Schweden [ 36 ] , Spanien [ 37 ] , der Tschechischen Republik [ 38 ] oder Ungarn [ 39 ] . Auch in Deutschland gibt es entsprechende Ansätze zur Erfassung regionaler Deprivation und zu ihrer Analyse in gesundheitlichen Fragestellungen, wie z.…”