The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across populations may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being. A consistent pattern across countries is that women report lower levels of mental well-being, as measured by the GHQ. This paper applies decomposition techniques to Irish data for 1994 and 2000 to...

A new methodology is used to quantify, track and explain the distribution of obesity and hypertension across areas differentiated by their degree of urbanicity. We construct an index of urbanicity from longitudinal data on community characteristics from the China Health and Nutrition Survey and...

There is now fairly substantial evidence of a socioeconomic gradient in low birthweight for developed countries. The standard summary statistic for this gradient is the concentration index. Using data from the recently published Growing Up in Ireland survey, this paper calculates this index for...

Using the nationally representative Slan dataset we calculate concentration indices for the incidence of obesity for men and women. We finder higher concentration indices for women than for men, but we also find that concentration indices fell between 2002 and 2007. However this appears to be...

This paper measures the degree of inequality of opportunity in birthweight and birthlength for a sample of Irish infants. The sample is partitioned into eight types by mothers’ education and mothers’ smoking status. Stochastic dominance tests reveal the presence of...