Showing papers in "Social Science & Medicine in 2006"

TL;DR: It is suggested that the studies of income inequality are more supportive in large areas because in that context income inequality serves as a measure of the scale of social stratification, or how hierarchical a society is.

TL;DR: Examination of heat-related health inequalities within one city in Phoenix, USA found people in warmer neighborhoods were more vulnerable to heat exposure because they had fewer social and material resources to cope with extreme heat.

TL;DR: Five dimensions of the social environment are identified-social support and social networks, socioeconomic position and income inequality, racial discrimination, social cohesion and social capital, and neighborhood factors-and each is considered in the context of physical activity to illustrate important differences between them.

TL;DR: This paper extends and modify the "stream of causation" metaphor along two axes: time, and levels of nested systems of social and biological organization, and proposes the concept of a risk regulator to advance the study of behavior and health in populations.

TL;DR: A critical review of studies carried out in low- and middle-income countries focusing on the economic consequences for households of illness and health care use highlights that health care financing strategies that place considerable emphasis on out-of-pocket payments can impoverish households.

TL;DR: Exposure to multiple forms of victimization over a child's life-course represents a substantial source of mental health risk, with ethnic minorities, those lower in socio-economic status, and those living in single parent and stepfamilies experiencing greater victimization.

TL;DR: The role that risk, and especially the perception of risk, its communication and management, played in driving the economic impact of SARS is examined and the potential for the rapid spread of infectious disease is not necessarily a greater threat than it has always been, but the effect that an outbreak can have on the economy is, which requires further research and policy development.

TL;DR: A conceptual model is described that incorporates Pierre Bourdieu's (1986) social capital theory into a framework of neighborhood social processes as health determinants and generates specific, empirically testable hypotheses for future research.

TL;DR: An integrative model is proposed, based on interdependence theory and communal coping perspectives, that explicitly considers dyadic processes as determinants of couple behavior and applies these constructs to consider how couple dynamics might influence adoption of risk-reducing health habits.

TL;DR: This study suggests that, rather than having a contextual influence on health, the beneficial properties of social capital can be found at the individual level, and finds a more complex cross-level interaction for social capital.

TL;DR: Analysis of data from a representative sample of adults in Cook County, Illinois shows a significant association between objective neighborhood SES and self-rated health after controlling for age, gender, and race/ethnicity, but the effect is substantially explained by individual SESand neighborhood perceptions.

TL;DR: It is suggested that an appreciation of the experience of such embodied doubt articulated by people who live with MUS may have a more general applicability to the analysis of social life under conditions of late modernity.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors report associations between self-reported experience of racial discrimination and health in New Zealand, using data from the 2002/2003 New Zealand Health Survey, a cross-sectional survey involving face-to-face interviews with 12,500 people.

TL;DR: It was found that, as part of recovery from depression, it was important for men to reconstruct a valued sense of themselves and their own masculinity, and the most common strategy was to incorporate values associated with hegemonic masculinity into narratives.

TL;DR: An international study in 18 countries to observe how spirituality, religion and personal beliefs (SRPB) relate to quality of life (QoL) showed that SRPB was highly correlated with all of the WHOQOL domains.

TL;DR: The adulthood life course pattern of depression levels and changes depends more strongly on education for women than for men, and two mediating interactions appear to account for the convergence.

TL;DR: Examination of how facts are talked about and experienced in struggles over these emergent, contested illnesses in the US finds that sufferers describe their experiences of being denied healthcare and legitimacy through bureaucratic categories of exclusion as dependent upon their lack of biological facts.

TL;DR: It is found that, in line with earlier research, personal levels of social support contribute to a better self-reported health status and the study suggests that social capital is additionally important for people's health.

TL;DR: Any firm conclusions about the possible beneficial or harmful effects of religious coping with cancer is lacking because many studies suffered from serious methodological problems, especially in the manner in which religious coping was conceptualised and measured.

TL;DR: It is argued that public health practitioners have a critical role to play in reframing thinking about health services and health policies for forced migrants, by promoting inclusion and by helping shape a narrative which integrates and values the experiences of this population.

TL;DR: It is suggested that future research should examine the construction and experience of social support in those who drop out of, or who do not attend, cancer support groups, in order to provide further insight into the contrast between social support within groups and support in other contexts.

TL;DR: If group-level collective efficacy is indeed important in the regulation of individual-level net energy balance, it suggests that future interventions to control weight by addressing the social environment at the community level may be promising.

TL;DR: The post-positivist, feminist, and phenomenological philosophies of science that are examined in this paper contest the seemingly unproblematic nature of evidence that underlies EBM by emphasizing different features of the social nature of science.

TL;DR: There was considerable overlap between rape-associated factors and known HIV risk factors, suggesting a need for further research on the interface of rape and HIV, and integrated prevention programming.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the impact of user fees on health service utilization and catastrophic health expenditures using data from National Household Surveys undertaken in 1997, 2000 and 2003, and found that the utilization among the poor increased much more rapidly after the abolition of fees than beforehand.

TL;DR: An attempt to determine attributes for a new index clearly focusing onquality of life for older people rather than health or other influences on quality of life, suggesting that further development of this measure should focus on an index of capability rather than preference-based utility.

TL;DR: Self-reported racial discrimination was more common in men than in women and in those with higher educational attainment, independent of gender, and discrimination was statistically significantly associated with worse physical and mental health in both men and women, before and after adjustment for age, education, income, and skin color.

TL;DR: A cost analysis within a geographical information system is used to estimate mean travel time (at any given location) to clinic and to derive the clinic catchments and constitutes a framework for modelling physical access to clinics in many developing country settings.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors employ syndemics theory to explain high rates of sexually transmitted disease among inner city African American and Puerto Rican heterosexual young adults in Hartford, CT, USA.

TL;DR: After controlling for baseline scores, the experimental group participants demonstrated significantly higher levels of self-esteem, optimism, and self-efficacy compared to the control group.