Until recently, the role of the family in the 'health inequalities' debate has been largely ignored. Using data from the youngest cohort in the West of Scotland Twenty-07 Study, three dimensions of family life (family structure, culture and conflict) are examined in respect of their association...

The study compares young people's mental health in the major Siberian city of Novosibirsk with small communities of the surrounding region, at the end of the statutory period of secondary education. Data are drawn from a school-based questionnaire survey of ninth graders and semi-structured...

This paper examines the relative importance of family socioeconomic status (SES) and school-based peer hierarchies for young people's psychoneuroendocrine response, represented by cortisol level. Data are drawn from a study of 2824, 15-year-olds in 22 Scottish secondary schools in 2006 who...

Many studies report few socioeconomic (SES) differences in health in youth, a pattern contrasting with that of health inequalities in childhood and adulthood. This paper focuses on the child-youth transition to examine the hypothesis of equalisation in health over this period. Specifically, we...

In the context of the continuing debate about how responsibility for the care of the disabled, chronically sick and elderly (collectively termed dependency groups) should be allocated as between the family and state and informal and formal caring agencies, this paper reports the basic findings...

This paper tests the hypothesis of an emerging or increasing female excess in general ill-health and physical symptoms, as well as psychological distress, during early to mid-adolescence. Self-reported data on general health (longstanding illness and health in the last 12 months), recent...

Within the qualitative perspective, data generated in the interview context present particularly difficult problems of interpretation. The status and validity of respondents' accounts in unclear. One dimension underlying their production is that between public and private domains, and their...

Data confirming the existence of social inequalities in health have continued to accumulate since the Black Report reported class inequalities across a broad range of causes of mortality, with an increasing emphasis on indicators of morbidity and current health status. Although evidence of...

Schools differ in the proportion of their pupils who smoke. Such differences transcend pupil intake characteristics and relate to the internal life of the school. Although adolescents' smoking behaviour has been associated with that of their peers, little consideration has been given to whether...

The assumption that social class inequalities in health are a persistent feature of the life-course has been questioned in a recent issue of this journal. On the evidence of mortality and chronic illness, the pattern in youth in Britain appears to be characterised by the lack of class...