Previous research suggests that criminal victimisation can impact negatively on both physical and psychological health. However, as yet, little is known about crime and its effects on population health in the former Soviet Union (fSU) – despite a sharp growth in crime rates in the countries in...

Despite the vast amount of research over the past fifteen years, there is still lively debate surrounding the role of social capital on individual health outcomes. This seems to stem from a lack of consistency regarding the definition, measurement and plausible theories linking this contextual...

Poor self-rated health (SRH) predicts mortality significantly. High trust has been shown to associate with better SRH in cross-sectional studies and survival in longitudinal studies. However, little is known about the associations between trust, SRH and mortality among ageing people. The present...

The aim of this study is to test the influence of personal income (absolute income hypothesis), income inequalities and welfare (relative income hypothesis) on health. A multilevel cross-sectional logit model is used with two alternative specifications of the dependent variable: self-perceived...

This paper uses data from the U.S. National Health Interview Surveys (N = 1,513,097) to describe and explain temporal patterns in black-white health disparities with models that simultaneously consider the unique effects of age, period, and cohort. First, we employ cross-classified random...

Social structures and socioeconomic patterns are the major determinants of population health. However, very few previous studies have simultaneously analysed the “social” and the “economic” indicators when addressing social determinants of health. We focus on the relevance of economic...

The extent that risk factors, identified in Western countries, account for health inequalities in Japan remains unclear. We analysed a nationally representative sample (Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions surveyed in 2001 (n = 40,243)). The cross-sectional association between self-rated...

Partnered individuals live longer, healthier lives. In explaining this association, processes involving both social causation (in which partnership provides health benefits to individuals) and health selection (in which those who find partners were healthier than those who do not) have been...

Self-rated health (SRH) is a widely used health indicator predicting morbidity and mortality in a wide range of populations. However, little is known about the stability and biological basis of SRH. The aim of this study was to map the stability of SRH from adolescence to early adulthood, and to...

The number of studies analysing income inequality and health are voluminous. However, when empirically testing the income inequality hypothesis, the level of aggregation could be crucial for whether we find an association or not and for the mechanisms we believe are active. This study hence...