Despite increasing interest in macrosocial determinants of health, progress has been hampered by a lack of information on contextual factors and a lack of clarity in defining aspects of the social environment which may be important. A theoretical and empirical approach to measuring social...

Population health tends to be better in societies where income is more equally distributed. Recent evidence suggests that many other social problems, including mental illness, violence, imprisonment, lack of trust, teenage births, obesity, drug abuse, and poor educational performance of...

Studies have suggested that members of ethnic minority groups might be healthier when they live in areas with a high concentration of people from their own ethnic group - in spite of higher levels of material deprivation typically found within such areas. We investigated the effects of...

This study shows that living in a better area reduces the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes but, among African-American women, living in an area in which they are in a racial minority may increase the risk. Using the 1991 cohort of single infants born to African-American women in Chicago, we...

Crime is seldom considered as an outcome in public health research. Yet major theoretical and empirical developments in the field of criminology during the past 50 years suggest that the same social environmental factors which predict geographic variation in crime rates may also be relevant for...

There is a very large literature examining income inequality in relation to health. Early reviews came to different interpretations of the evidence, though a large majority of studies reported that health tended to be worse in more unequal societies. More recent studies, not included in those...