Background: We characterized informally employed US domestic workers' (DWers) exposure to patterns of workplace hazards, as well as to single hazards, and examined associations with DWers' work-related and general health.
Methods: We analyzed cross-sectional data from the sole nationwide survey of informally employed US DWers with work-related hazards data, conducted in 14 cities (2011-2012; N = 2086). We characterized DWers' exposures using four approaches: single exposures (n = 19 hazards), composite exposure to hazards selected a priori, classification trees, and latent class analysis.
Introduction: Few studies, mostly descriptive, have quantitatively analyzed the working conditions of domestic workers (DWers) informally employed by private households in the USA. These workers are explicitly or effectively excluded from numerous workplace protections, and scant data exist on their exposures or how best to categorize them.
Methods: We analyzed data from the sole nationwide survey of informally employed US DWers with work-related hazards data, conducted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the University of Illinois Chicago Center for Urban Economic Development, and the DataCenter in 14 US cities (2011-2012; N = 2086).
This study contributes to the debate on whether income inequality is harmful for health by addressing several analytical weaknesses of previous studies. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in combination with tract-level measures of income inequality in the United States, we estimate the effects of differential exposure to income inequality during three decades of the life course on mortality. Our study is among the first to consider the implications of income inequality within U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEconomic instability, social changes, and new social policies place economic insecurity high on the scholarly and political agenda. We contribute to these debates by proposing a new multidimensional, intertemporal measure of economic insecurity that accounts for both its multiplicity and its dynamism. First, we develop three theory-driven, multidimensional measures of economic insecurity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn India, population-based cancer registries (PBCRs) cover less than 15% of the urban and 1% of the rural population. Our study examines practices of registration in PBCRs in India to understand efforts to include rural populations in registries and efforts to measure social inequalities in cancer incidence. We selected a purposive sample of six PBCRs in Maharashtra, Kerala, Punjab and Mizoram and conducted semistructured interviews with staff to understand approaches and challenges to cancer registration, and the sociodemographic information collected by PBCRs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Policy Points Changes in US state policies since the 1970s, particularly after 2010, have played an important role in the stagnation and recent decline in US life expectancy. Some US state policies appear to be key levers for improving life expectancy, such as policies on tobacco, labor, immigration, civil rights, and the environment. US life expectancy is estimated to be 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Although global birth registration coverage has improved from 58% to 71% among children under five globally, inequities in birth registration coverage by wealth, urban/rural location, maternal education and access to a health facility persist. Few studies examine whether inequities in birth registration in low-income and middle-income countries have changed over time.
Methods: We combined information on caregiver reported birth registration of 1.
Background: Globally, progress to improve data on child protection outcomes has been slower than efforts to improve data on child nutrition, vaccination and development outcomes in the under-five age group. The Sustainable Development Goals included several child protection targets further necessitating the need to track progress on child protection, but few studies have examined the varied data landscape for child protection within countries.
Objective: This mixed-methods study aims to examine (1) the prevalence of child protection outcomes in Nepal, (2) the types of data the child protection sector uses, and (3) recommendations to improve the collection, analysis and use of child protection data.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2020
Adult mortality varies greatly by educational attainment. Explanations have focused on actions and choices made by individuals, neglecting contextual factors such as economic and policy environments. This study takes an important step toward explaining educational disparities in U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScholars interested in the relationship between social context and health have recently turned attention further "upstream" to understand how political, social, and economic institutions shape the distribution of life chances across contexts. We compare minority health inequalities across 22 European countries ( N = 199,981) to investigate how two such arrangements-welfare state effort and immigrant incorporation policies-influence the distribution of health and health inequalities. We examine two measures of health from seven waves of the European Social Survey.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis essay brings together intersectionality and institutional approaches to health inequalities, suggesting an integrative analytical framework that accounts for the complexity of the intertwined influence of both individual social positioning and institutional stratification on health. This essay therefore advances the emerging scholarship on the relevance of intersectionality to health inequalities research. We argue that intersectionality provides a strong analytical tool for an integrated understanding of health inequalities beyond the purely socioeconomic by addressing the multiple layers of privilege and disadvantage, including race, migration and ethnicity, gender and sexuality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this study, we question (1) whether the relationship between unemployment and mental healthcare use, controlling for mental health status, varies across European countries and (2) whether these differences are patterned by a combination of unemployment and healthcare generosity. We hypothesize that medicalization of unemployment is stronger in countries where a low level of unemployment generosity is combined with a high level of healthcare generosity. A subsample of 36,306 working-age respondents from rounds 64.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt has been suggested that as medicine advances and mortality declines, socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes will grow. Yet, most research on this topic uses data from affluent Western democracies, where mortality is declining in small increments. We argue that the Global South represents the ideal setting to study this issue in a context of rapid mortality decline.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScand J Public Health
February 2018
Aims: In this study we aimed to analyze gender health equity as a case of how social policy contributes to population health. We analyzed three sets of social-investment policies implemented in Europe and previously hypothesized to reduce gender inequity in labor market outcomes: childcare; active labor market programs; and long-term care.
Methods: We use 12 indicators of social-investment policies from the OECD Social Expenditure Database, the OECD Family Database, and the Social Policy Indicators' Parental Leave Benefit Dataset.
This introduction summarizes the main findings of the Supplement 'Social inequalities in health and their determinants' to the European Journal of Public Health. The 16 articles that constitute this supplement use the new ESS (2014) health module data to analyze the distribution of health across European populations. Three main themes run across these articles: documentation of cross-national variation in the magnitude and patterning of health inequalities; assessment of health determinants variation across populations and in their contribution to health inequalities; and the examination of the effects of health outcomes across social groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Economic crises constitute a shock to societies with potentially harmful effects to the mental health status of the population, including depressive symptoms, and existing health inequalities.
Methods: With recent data from the European Social Survey (2006–14), this study investigates how the economic recession in Europe starting in 2007 has affected health inequalities in 21 European nations. Depressive feelings were measured with the CES-D eight-item depression scale.
The United States has a mortality disadvantage relative to its political and economic peer group of other rich democracies. Recently it has been suggested that there could be a role for social policy in explaining this disadvantage. In this paper, we test this "social policy hypothesis" by presenting a time-series cross-section analysis from 1970 to 2010 of the association between welfare state generosity (for unemployment insurance, sickness benefits, and pensions) and life expectancy, for the US and 17 other high-income countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Little current research examines associations between infant mortality and US states' funding for family planning services and for abortion, despite growing efforts to restrict reproductive rights and services and documented associations between unintended pregnancy and infant mortality.
Material And Methods: We obtained publicly available data on state-only public funding for family planning and abortion services (years available: 1980, 1987, 1994, 2001, 2006, and 2010) and corresponding annual data on US county infant death rates. We modeled the funding as both fraction of state expenditures and per capita spending (per woman, age 15-44).
Policy-oriented population health targets, such as the Millennium Development Goals and national targets to address health inequities, are typically based on trends of a decade or less. To test whether expanded timeframes might be more apt, we analyzed 50-year trends in US infant death rates (1960-2010) jointly by income and race/ethnicity. The largest annual per cent changes in the infant death rate (between -4 and -10 per cent), for all racial/ethnic groups, in the lowest income quintile occurred between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, and in the second lowest income quintile between the mid-1960s and 1973.
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