Abstract
Health IssueThe association between a number of socio-economic determinants and health has been amply demonstrated in Canada and elsewhere. Over the past decades, women's increased labour force participation and changing family structure, among other changes in the socio-economic environment, have altered social roles considerably and lead one to expect that the pattern of disparities in health among women and men will also have changed. Using data from the CCHS (2000), this chapter investigates the association between selected socio-economic determinants of health and two specific self-reported outcomes among women and men: (a) self-perceived health and (b) self-reports of chronic conditions.Key FindingsThe descriptive picture demonstrated by this CCHS dataset is that 10% of men aged 65 and over report low income, versus 23% of women within the same age bracket. The results of the logistic regression models calculated for women and men on two outcome variables suggest that the selected socio-economic determinants used in this analysis are important for women and for men in a differential manner. These results while supporting other results illustrate the need to refine social and economic characteristics used in surveys such as the CCHS so that they would become more accurate predictors of health status given that there are personal, cultural and environmental dimensions to take into account.RecommendationsBecause it was shown that socio economic determinants of health are context sensitive and evolve over time, studies should be designed to examine the complex temporal interactions between a variety of social and biological determinants of health from a life course perspective. Examples are provided in the chapter.
Highlights
The association between socio-economic determinants and health has been amply demonstrated in Canada and elsewhere,[1,2,3,4,5,6,7], [8,9] the socio-economically better off generally performing better on most measures of health status, including self-reports of health
These results while supporting other results illustrate the need to refine social and economic characteristics used in surveys such as the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) so that they would become more accurate predictors of health status given that there are personal, cultural and environmental dimensions to take into account
These results present additional evidence for the existence of socio-economic gradients among women and men in a range of health measures and raise additional questions regarding the specific patterns of these socio-economic gradients in health
Summary
The association between socio-economic determinants and health has been amply demonstrated in Canada and elsewhere,[1,2,3,4,5,6,7], [8,9] the socio-economically better off generally performing better on most measures of health status, including self-reports of health. In addition to Walters,[7] Macintyre and Hunt[4] point out that in the field of socio-economic inequalities in health, there is a need to examine the specific nature of gender biases, including the way in which social classifications were developed for women and for men (e.g. assessing whether marital and parental roles were accounted for in a gender-sensitive manner).[14,27,28,29,30,31,32] Taking a variety of socio-economic determinants into account, a number of chapters in this Report demonstrate the relation between sex and gender and health outcomes, ranging from personal health practices (e.g. smoking behaviour) to depression, cardiovascular disease, fertility, medication use and mortality. These results present additional evidence for the existence of socio-economic gradients among women and men in a range of health measures and raise additional questions regarding the specific patterns of these socio-economic gradients in health
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