Showing papers in "Social Science & Medicine in 2004"

TL;DR: A psychometrically well-justified measure of work-related stress (ERI) grounded in sociological theory is available for comparative socioepidemiologic investigations in advanced societies within and beyond Europe.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors combine multiple cross-sections of data drawn from the National Population Health Survey and Canadian Community Health Survey to confirm the existence of the "healthy immigrant effect", specifically that immigrants are in relatively better health on arrival in Canada compared to native-born Canadians, and that immigrant health converges with years in Canada to nativeborn levels.

TL;DR: There are several key factors (age, income, and education) that discriminate between US online and offline health information seekers; this suggests that general "digital divide" characteristics influence where health information is sought.

TL;DR: The findings suggest the value of models that include a wide range of health and health-determinant variables, and affirm the importance of looking more closely at gender differences in health, are affirm.

TL;DR: It is shown that identifying useful independent neighborhood effect parameters is impossible, as currently conceptualized with observational data, and randomized community trials are advocated as a superior research strategy.

TL;DR: It is concluded that acculturation as a variable in health research may be based more on ethnic stereotyping than on objective representations of cultural difference.

TL;DR: It is concluded that transactional sex may place women at increased risk for HIV, and is associated with gender-based violence, substance use and socio-economic disadvantage.

TL;DR: The results show that the study of moral distress must focus more on the context of the ethical dilemmas, and that the work organization must provide better support resources and structures to decrease moral distress.

TL;DR: Pressure from peers was one of the strongest influencing factors for binge drinking and seemed to outweigh parental influences, especially from late adolescence onwards, which varied according to both the predominant adult and adolescent drinking culture.

TL;DR: It is maintained that communal gardening sites offer one practical way in which it may be possible to develop a 'therapeutic landscape', by enhancing the quality of life and emotional well being of older people.

TL;DR: The case for the robust associations between measures of adverse psychosocial environment and ill health is advanced, as they are based on comparative studies across several European countries and as they combine different types of study designs.

TL;DR: Logistic regression analyses revealed that a cumulative index of biological risk explained 35.4% of the difference in mortality risk between those with higher versus lower SES, suggesting the potential value of a multi-systems view of biological pathways through which SES ultimately affects morbidity and mortality.

TL;DR: A conceptual framework for evidence-based decision-making is developed, focusing on how context impacts on what constitutes evidence and how that evidence is utilised, suggesting that it may be more important how evidence is used than how it is defined.

TL;DR: It is argued that global and national socio-political-economic trends have increased the power of business classes and lowered that of working classes, and neo-liberal policies accompanying these trends led to increased income inequality but also poverty and unequal access to many other health-relevant resources.

TL;DR: The CI provides a summary measure of socioeconomic inequality, and enabled comparisons across gender, age, and ethnicity, and found remarkable ethnic differences in the relationship between SES and obesity.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reviewed 11 published and evaluated school-based HIV/AIDS risk reduction programs for youth in Africa and found that knowledge and attitudes are easy to change, but behaviours are much more challenging.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of state unemployment and economic growth rates on mortality in the states of Germany over the period 1980-2000, both in a static and a dynamic econometric model.

TL;DR: The evidence indicates that it is efficient to select psychosomatic symptoms as short-range target outcomes and sick leave as a medium- range target outcome of the theory-based intervention of the occupational stress reduction approach.

TL;DR: Exemplary research in reproductive health research is summarized, showing how ethnographic studies by medical anthropologists contribute new insights to the growing public health and demographic literature on men and reproductive health.

TL;DR: Evidence for women suggests that the determinants of obesity are multiple and multilevel, and attempts to address this growing social problem will similarly require a multi-faceted and multilesvel approach.

TL;DR: Investigating how bereaved and traumatised populations experience research participation in Norway finds that processes of meaning reconstruction and increased awareness of the bereavement process were facilitated by the interviews, but three-quarters of the interviewees reported that it was to a greater or lesser degree painful to talk about the traumatic loss.

TL;DR: The research reveals firstly that nurses' views and values inform their implementation of health policy; secondly that nurses feel excluded from the process of policy change; and finally that social, financial and human resources are insufficiently incorporated into the policy implementation process.

TL;DR: Higher income levels in the future could lead to the reversal of the health improvements achieved in the last two decades, if diet-related noncommunicable diseases cannot be controlled.

TL;DR: The relationship between self-reported health and mortality risk is found to be stronger among men for several causes, although not for all, and the specific predictive power of this important global measure of health is better understood.

TL;DR: Oakes raises a series of important questions on the validity of past work on neighborhood health effects and suggests directions the field should take (Oakes, 2003) as mentioned in this paper, however, these issues are common to epidemiology generally (and to observational studies in other fields) and are not necessarily specific to research on neighborhood effects.

TL;DR: A population based case-control study of all incident first events of myocardial infarction among men and women, living in the Stockholm region 1992-94 found a graded response to the accumulation of disadvantaged socio-economic positions over the life course and found evidence for effects of critical periods and of social mobility.

TL;DR: Qualitative data generated from in-depth interviews with 22 GPs working in demographically diverse primary care practices in Sheffield identified that GPs do not address sexual health proactively with older people and that, within primary care, sexual health is equated with younger people and not seen as a 'legitimate' topic for discussion with this age group.

TL;DR: The pattern of results suggests that atypical forms of employment do not have durable adverse health consequences on workers, and public policies that aim at improving the working conditions of workers in weak bargaining positions should give special attention to equity issues.

TL;DR: If social support buffers the adverse effects of low health literacy, more effective interventions can be designed to address differences in individuals' social support system in addition to individual differences in reading and comprehension.

TL;DR: Issues of self and shame in illness accounts from women with chronic pain were shaped according to cultural discourses of gender and disease according to a gendered work of credibility as woman and as ill.