Despite the overall decline in cigarette smoking prevalence in the US, social class inequalities in smoking are likely to persist, or even to widen. One possible reason for the increasing gap in smoking prevalence across social class could be our lack of understanding of causal mechanisms: in...

Absolute income is robustly associated with health status. Few studies have, however, examined if relative income is independently associated with health. We examined if, over and above the effects of absolute income, individual relative deprivation in income as well as position in the income...

We sought to explore a possible association between higher parental socioeconomic position and lower child cancer mortality. We examined total cancer mortality as well as site-specific cancer mortality. We constructed a retrospective birth cohort by linking South Korean birth records to death...

Although there is increasing evidence supporting the associations between social capital and health, less is known of potential effects in Latin American countries. Our objective was to examine associations of different components of social capital with self-rated health in Colombia. The study...

This study examined the association between area-level education and BMI among adults in Cairo, Egypt. A sample of 3993 households including 1990 men and 2003 women were analyzed from the 2007 Cairo Urban Inequity Study, a study which aimed to identify potential intra-urban inequities in health...

Three causal processes have been proposed to explain associations between group income inequality and individual health outcomes, each of which implies health effects for different segments of the population. We present a novel conceptual and analytic framework for the quantitative evaluation of...

Despite South Africa's history of violent political conflict, and the link between stressful experiences and smoking in the literature, no public health study has examined South Africans' experiences of human rights violations and smoking. Using data from participants in the nationally...

While the association between education and adult health is well documented, it is unclear whether quantity (i.e. years of schooling) or credentials (i.e. degrees) drive this association. Individuals with degrees may have better health than their non-credentialed counterparts given similar years...

Neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage is associated to increased individual risk of ischemic heart disease (IHD). However, the value of this association for causal inference is uncertain. Moreover, neighborhoods are often defined by available administrative boundaries without evaluating in...