“Author Archive”
Stories written by Social Science and Medicine
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: July 2013 Source:Social Science & Medicine, Volume 89 Author(s): Benjamin Johns , Laura Steinhardt , Damian G. Walker , David H. Peters , David Bishai Producing services efficiently and equitably are important goals for health systems. Many countries pursue horizontal equity – providing people with the same illnesses equal access to health services – by locating facilities in remote areas.
May 16th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: July 2013 Source:Social Science & Medicine, Volume 89 Author(s): Lucy A. Peipins , Shannon Graham , Randall Young , Brian Lewis , Barry Flanagan Low-income women with breast cancer who rely on public transportation may have difficulty in completing recommended radiation therapy due to inadequate access to radiation facilities. Using a geographic information system (GIS) and network analysis we quantified spatial accessibility to radiation treatment facilities in the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area. We built a transportation network model that included all bus and rail routes and stops, system transfers and walk and wait times experienced by public transportation system travelers. We also built a private transportation network to model travel times by automobile.
May 16th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: July 2013 Source:Social Science & Medicine, Volume 89 Author(s): Jonathan T. Macy , Laurie Chassin , Clark C. Presson Economic declines and their associated stress, shortage of financial resources, and changes in available time can impair health behaviors. This study tested the association between change in working hours, change in employment status, and financial strain and health behaviors measured after the 2008 recession after controlling for pre-recession levels of the health behaviors. The moderating influences of demographic factors and pre-recession levels of the health behaviors on the association between change in working hours and employment status and financial strain and the health behaviors were also tested
May 15th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: July 2013 Source:Social Science & Medicine, Volume 89 Author(s): Gerry Veenstra Informed by intersectionality theory, a tradition that theorizes intersecting power relations of racism, patriarchy, classism and heterosexism, this paper investigates the degree to which race, gender, class and sexuality manifest distinct and interconnected associations with self-reported hypertension in nationally-representative survey data from Canada. Binary logistic regression is used to model the main effects of, and interactions between, race, gender, education, household income and sexual orientation on hypertension, controlling for age, using data from the 2003 Canadian Community Health Survey (n = 90,310). From a main effects (‘additive’) perspective, Black respondents, respondents with less than high school and poorer respondents were significantly more likely than White respondents, university-educated Canadians and wealthier Canadians, respectively, to report hypertension. However, the interactive models indicate that the additive models were poor predictors of hypertension for wealthy Black men, wealthy South Asian women, women with less than a high school diploma and wealthy bisexual respondents, who were more likely than expected to report hypertension, and for poor Black men, poor South Asian women, poor South Asian men and women with a university degree, who were less likely than expected to report hypertension. It appears that, with regard to blood pressure at least, Canadians experience the health effects of education differently by their genders and the health effects of income differently by their identities defined at the intersection of race and gender.
May 14th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: July 2013 Source:Social Science & Medicine, Volume 89 Author(s): Emmanouil Mentzakis , Marc Suhrcke , Bayard Roberts , Adrianna Murphy , Martin McKee While the adverse health and economic consequences attributable to alcohol consumption are widely acknowledged, its impact on psychological wellbeing is less well understood. This is to a large extent due to the challenge of establishing causal effects of alcohol consumption when using standard single-equation econometric analyses. Using a unique dataset collected in 2010/11 of 18,000 individuals and also community characteristics from nine countries of the former Soviet Union, a region with a major burden of alcohol related ill health, we address this problem by employing an instrumental variable approach to identify any causal effects of alcohol consumption on mental well-being. The availability of 24-h alcohol sales outlets in the neighbourhood of the individuals is used as an instrument, based on theoretical reasoning and statistical testing of its validity. We find that increased alcohol consumption decreases well-being and that ignoring endogeneity leads to underestimation of this effect
May 13th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: Available online 10 May 2013 Source:Social Science & Medicine Author(s): Julia K. Wolff , Florian Schmiedek , Annette Brose , Ulman Lindenberger Whether received social support matches the actual needs of the recipient is a largely overlooked aspect in research on associations of support and well-being. In particular, studies that investigate the match of needed and received support from a within-person perspective are rare. Therefore, we investigated the daily within-person relationship of well-being and the balance of needed and received social support in a German Sample of 79 younger (23-34 years) and 88 older adults (68-83 years).
May 11th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: Available online 9 May 2013 Source:Social Science & Medicine Author(s): Sujarwoto Sujarwoto , Gindo Tampubolon Social capital has been shown to be positively associated with a range of health outcomes, yet few studies have explored the association between mother’s social capital and children’s health. This study examines the relation between mothers’ access to social capital (via participation in community activities) and child health. Instrumental variable estimation was applied to cross sectional data of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) 2007 which consist of face-to-face interviews among the adult population in Indonesia (N mothers = 3,450, N children = 4,612, N communities = 309, and participation rate at 92%). The findings show strong evidence for the causal flow running from a mother’s social capital to her children’s health. All instruments are highly correlated with mothers’ social capital but uncorrelated with child health
May 10th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: Available online 6 May 2013Source:Social Science & Medicine Author(s): Miranda R. Waggoner As medical reports over the last decade indicate that food allergies among children are on the rise, peanut allergies in particular have become a topic of intense social debate. While peanut allergies are potentially fatal, they affect very few children at the population level. Yet, peanut allergies are characterized in medical and popular literature as a rising “epidemic,” and myriad and broad-based social responses have emerged to address peanut allergy risk in public spaces. This analysis compares medical literature to other textual sources, including media reports, legislation, and advocacy between 1980 and 2010 in order to examine how peanut allergies transformed from a rare medical malady into a contemporary public health problem.
May 7th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: Available online 4 May 2013Source:Social Science & Medicine Author(s): Sepideh Modrek , Mark R. Cullen While the negative effects of unemployment have been well studied, the consequences of layoffs and downsizing for those who remain employed are less well understood. This study used human resources and health claimsdata from a large multi-site fully insured aluminum company to explore the health consequences of downsizing on the remaining workforce. We exploit the variation in the timing and intensity of layoff to categorize 30 plants as high or low layoff plants. Next, we select a stably employed cohort of workers with history of health insurance going back to 2006 to 1) describe the selection process into layoff and 2) explore the association between the severity of plant level layoffs and the incidence of four chronic conditions in the remaining workforce
May 4th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: July 2013Source:Social Science & Medicine, Volume 88 Author(s): Jennifer B. Kane , Michelle L. Frisco In the United States, adolescent obesity reduces young women’s odds of forming romantic and sexual partnerships but increases the likelihood of risky sexual behavior when partnerships occur. This led us to conduct a study examining the relationship between adolescent obesity and adolescent childbearing. Our study has two aims.
May 4th, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: July 2013Source:Social Science & Medicine, Volume 88 Author(s): Gina Porter , Kate Hampshire , Christine Dunn , Richard Hall , Martin Levesley , Kim Burton , Steve Robson , Albert Abane , Mwenza Blell , Julia Panther Across sub-Saharan Africa, women and children play major roles as pedestrian load-transporters, in the widespread absence of basic sanitation services, electricity and affordable/reliable motorised transport. The majority of loads, including water and firewood for domestic purposes, are carried on the head. Load-carrying has implications not only for school attendance and performance, women’s time budgets and gender relations, but arguably also for health and well-being. We report findings from a comprehensive review of relevant literature, undertaken June–September 2012, focussing particularly on biomechanics, maternal health, and the psycho-social impacts of load-carrying; we also draw from our own research.
May 3rd, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: July 2013Source:Social Science & Medicine, Volume 88 Author(s): Julia M. Goodman , Deborah Karasek , Elizabeth Anderson , Ralph A. Catalano Natural selection conserves mechanisms allowing women to spontaneously abort gestations least likely to yield fit offspring. Small gestational size has been proposed as an indicator of fitness observable by maternal biology.
May 3rd, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: Available online 2 May 2013Source:Social Science & Medicine Author(s): Matthew E. Archibald , Caddie[ Putnam Rankin Ongoing socioeconomic and racial and ethnic gaps in access to health care make it vital to examine the relationship between characteristics of communities and their impact on the availability of healthcare services. This study investigates how community-based resource constraints influence the provision of healthcare services in the United States. Drawing on several theoretical frameworks including research in the spatial distribution of healthcare, we compile data on 3,141 U.S.
May 2nd, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
By Social Science and Medicine
Publication date: Available online 2 May 2013Source:Social Science & Medicine Author(s): Christine Percheski , Sharon Bzostek An increasing proportion of children in the United States lives in families with complicated family structures and a mix of immigrant and US-born family members. Eligibility rules for health insurance coverage, however, were not designed with these families in mind. The result can be complicated insurance patterns among siblings within families, with some “sibships” only being partially-insured, and other sibships having both private and public coverage. We hypothesize that mixed coverage among siblings causes confusion and logistical difficulties for parents and may lead to less access to appropriate health care for their children. In this article, we use data from the 2009-2011 National Health Interview Survey (n=51,418 children in 20,478 sibships) to present estimates of the prevalence of mixed health insurance coverage among siblings and describe the predictors of such coverage
May 2nd, 2013 | Posted in Journal Watch | Read More »
