Measures Of Social Inequality Research Articles

Mechanisms of equality and inequality in mammalian societies.

The extent of (in)equality is highly diverse across species of social mammals, but we have a poor understanding of the factors that produce or inhibit equitable social organizations. Here, we adopt a comparative evolutionary perspective to test whether the evolution of social dominance hierarchies, a measure of social inequality in animals, exhibits phylogenetic conservatism and whether interspecific variation in these traits can be explained by sex, age or captivity. We find that hierarchy steepness and directional consistency evolve rapidly without any apparent constraint from evolutionary history. Given this extraordinary variability, we next consider multiple factors that have evolved to mitigate social inequality. Social networks, coalitionary support and knowledge transfer advantage to privilege some individuals over others. Nutritional access and prenatal stressors can impact the development of offspring, generating health disparities with intergenerational consequences. Intergenerational transfer of material resources (e.g. stone tools, food stashes, territories) advantage those who receive. Nonetheless, many of the same social species that experience unequal access to food (survival) and mates (reproduction) engage in levelling mechanisms such as food sharing, adoption, revolutionary coalitions, forgiveness and inequity aversion. Taken together, mammals rely upon a suite of mechanisms of (in)equality to balance the costs and benefits of group living. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolutionary ecology of inequality'.

What Happened to Brussels? The Big Decline and Muslim Immigration

We examined regional inequality in Belgium, both in the 19 communes of Brussels and in the country as a whole (n = 589 communes). We find very strong relationships between Muslim% of the population and a variety of social outcomes such as crime rate, educational attainment, and median income. For the 19 communes of Brussels, we find a correlation of -.94 between Muslim% and a general factor of socioeconomic variables (S factor) based on 22 diverse indicators. The slope for this relationship is -7.52, meaning that a change in S going from 0% to 100% Muslim corresponds to a worsening of overall social well-being by 7.52 (commune-level) standard deviations. For the entire country, we have data for 8 measures of social inequality. Analysis of the indicators shows an S factor which is very similar to the one from the Brussels data only based on the full set of indicators (r’s = .98). In the full dataset, the correlation between S and Muslim% is -.52, with a slope of -8.05. Adding covariates for age, population density, and spatial autocorrelation changes this slope to -8.77. Thus, the expected change going from a 0% to 100% Muslim population is -8.77 standard deviations in general social well-being. We discuss our findings in relation to other research on immigration and social inequality, with a focus on the causal influence of intelligence on life outcomes in general.

Biosocial measures of social inequality

Biosocial measures of social inequality

Measuring social inequality in health amongst indigenous peoples in the Arctic. A comparison of different indicators of social disparity among the Inuit in Greenland

The purpose of the article is to compare different indicators of social position as measures of social inequality in health in a population sample from an indigenous arctic people, the Inuit in Greenland. Data was collected during 2005–2015 and consisted of information from 3967 adult Inuit from towns and villages in all parts of Greenland. Social inequalities for smoking and central obesity were analysed in relation to seven indicators of social disparity in four dimensions, i.e. education and employment, economic status, sociocultural position, and place of residence. For each indicator we calculated age-adjusted prevalence by social group, rate ratio and the concentration index. The indicators were correlated with Pearson’s r ranging from 0.24 to 0.82. Concentration indices ranged from 0.01 to 0.17. We could not conclude that one indicator was superior to others. Most of the indicators were traditional socioeconomic indicators used extensively in research in western countries and these seemed to be useful among the Inuit too, in particular household assets and job. Two sociocultural indicators developed for use among the Inuit and which included parameters specific to the indigenous peoples in the transition from a traditional to a modern life style proved to be equally useful but not superior to the traditional socioeconomic indicators. The choice of indicator must depend on what it is realistic to collect in the actual research setting and the use of more than one indicator is recommended. It is suggested to further develop culture specific indicators of social position for indigenous peoples.

So What “Should” We Use? Evaluating the Impact of Five Racial Measures on Markers of Social Inequality

In recent years, researchers have increasingly noted the malleability of racial boundaries across time, context, and life course. Although this research has advanced our knowledge of the maintenance and perceptions of racial groups, it has introduced a new question: If we are attempting to best capture the actual variation in racial inequality, how should we operationalize race? Using the 2006 wave of the Portraits of American Life Study, a national-level, in-home survey with extensive race measures and oversamples of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, the authors identify five ways that race can be and to varying degrees is operationalized: census, combined race/ethnic, pentagon, triracial, and skin tone measures. Using the Vuong non-nested model tests, the authors compare the effectiveness of these five measurements in predicting three measures of social inequality: household income, education, and self-rated health. The authors find that overall, Hollinger’s ethnoracial pentagon is best able to capture existing inequality. Thus, for scholars attempting to understand variation in contemporary racial inequality, this research suggests that scholars should use five monoracial categories: White, Black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian.

What Is Social Inequality and Why Does it Matter? Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

As distinct from income or wealth inequality, ‘social inequality’ is currently poorly understood and, at best, unevenly measured. We conceptualize social inequality as the relative position of individuals along a number of dimensions that measure achieved outcomes and, innovatively, expectations about future outcomes. Using data from 12 Central and Eastern European countries, we find that cross-national patterns of social inequality differ significantly from patterns derived from income inequality measures. Moreover, our measure of social inequality is much better correlated than income inequality with other country differences such as higher levels of economic performance and human development, and stronger political institutions.

Associations between social inequality and tooth loss in a household sample of elderly Thai people aged ≥60 years old.

To assess the relationship between social inequality and the number of remaining teeth in an elderly Thai population. Having twenty or more remaining teeth is an important indicator of optimal oral health in the elderly. The data for this study were derived from the Survey of Older Persons in Thailand, conducted by the National Statistical Office, based on face-to-face interviews with people aged ≥60. The total sample was 30 427. The oral health measure was self-reported remaining number of teeth. Income, education and possession of durable goods were utilised as measures of social inequality. More than half of the sample (57.0%) was women. The majority (73.2%) was in the age range 60-74 years old. Less than a fifth (15.5%) had 7 or more years of education. A third earned <20 000 Thai Baht (THB) per annum (defined as poor). More than half (52.8%) of the sample had <20 remaining teeth. There was a link between social inequalities and tooth loss. In the adjusted model, elderly people, who were older than 75, who were not under a married status, had a lower level of education, had a lower income, and who did not own luxury goods, were 2.84 (CI 95% 2.66-3.03), 1.31 (CI 95% 1.21-1.41), 1.44 (CI 95% 1.34-1.56), 1.12 (CI 95% 1.13-1.29) and 1.21 (CI 95% 1.13-1.29) times more likely to have 19 or fewer teeth remaining, respectively. Social inequality is related to the number of remaining teeth in elderly Thai people.

Subject or Signifier?: Food and the History of Early North America

AbstractWhen food appears in the scholarly literature on early America, it is most often as part of a discussion of other subjects. Social historians and ethnohistorians have interpreted particular foods as a defining feature of African and Native American cultures, measuring their endurance and/or assimilation with European society by reference to those foods. Social historians of gender have found the roots of larger social relationships in the daily labor necessary to produce food. Other historians have seen in staple crops or characteristic recipes a means to trace either the regional variations in British America or the convergence of those cultures into an American national identity. A final group has focused on commodities, especially tea and sugar, as the driving force behind the development of 18th‐century consumer culture and norms of gentility. Food is a common thread in each of these fields of study but not, as yet, a field of its own.More recent studies of food in early America suggest that a new phase in the scholarship is emerging, with distinct advances over these earlier approaches. Where earlier accounts interpreted food as deriving its meaning from a single discourse or stable set of symbols (gender, status, race, ethnicity, or gentility, for example), food in this newer literature is multifaceted and polyvalent. At any given place, time, and occasion, food can be a subject in its own right, a signifier with multiple connotations, or both: food is at once a biological necessity, the focus of daily life and household labor, a marker of identity, and a measure of social inequality. Given this complexity, newer literature has called into question historians' understanding of how cultures and identities are transmitted from place to place or generation to generation and has articulated a more nuanced understanding of cultural exchange and encounter. These are arguably food's greatest potential contributions to the historiography of early America and vice versa.

From Babel to Brussels: European Integration and the Importance of Transnational Linguistic Capital

Globalisation and the political process of European integration opened the European Union member states to one another. As different EU member states have different languages, participation in globalisation and the process of European integration is dependent on Europeans’ ability to speak the languages of others. Those who speak multiple languages can more easily come into contact with citizens of other countries, conduct business and diplomacy, cooperate academically, organise protests across national boundaries, or enter into romantic relations with them. In short, they can socialise transnationally in a number of different dimensions. Those who only speak their native language are, in contrast, tied to their home country and can only take slight advantage of the perks of a united Europe and a globalised world. Possessing transnational linguistic capital is a deciding factor in whether or not someone can participate in an emerging European society; it becomes a new measure of social inequality, a resource that can either lead to societal inclusion or exclusion.The question central to our study is to what degree citizens in the twenty‐ seven EU member states possess transnational linguistic capital and how to explain the differences in multilingualism both between and within the member states. We present a general explanatory model for foreign language proficiency, create hypotheses from this model and test them empirically. Drawing on a survey conducted in twenty‐seven European countries it can be shown that the peoples’ ability to speak different languages can be very well predicted with the help of the different explanatory factors. We find that country size, the prevalence of a respondent’s native language, the linguistic difference between one’s mother tongue and the foreign language, and age affect language acquisition negatively, whereas a country’s level of education has a positive influence. Using Bourdieu’s theory of social class, we show that besides other factors a respondent’s social class position and the level of education are important micro‐level factors that help to increase a person’s transnational linguistic capital.One must put these results in the context of the state of the art. The analysis of multilingualism is a major topic in linguistics, psychology, and education. The societal conditions in which language learners are embedded are hardly taken into account in these studies. This would not be worth discussing any further if sociology was not relevant to multilingualism; but the contrary seems to be true. Our analysis shows that the neglected societal conditions are actually of central importance in determining transnational linguistic capital.

Explaining health inequality: Evidence from the UK

0277-9536/$ e see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.12.015 With its uniquely long historical series of officially collected data on occupational mortality, researchers in the UK have been well placed to investigate the causes of health inequality. Since 1921, the decennial Census of England and Wales has contained an “Occupational Mortality Supplement” that tabulates mortality according to groups of occupations, which came to be known as “social classes”. After 1931 the class groups were sufficiently comparable to allow trends to be discerned. The Black Report of 1980 (DHSS, 1980; Townsend, Davidson, & Whitehead, 1988), which put health inequality onto the agenda of research and policy for the next 30 years, was based on these official statistics. The official measure of social class used in the Report was not ideal as a measure of social inequality, as it was never clear exactly what it operationalized. In some census volumes it was described as a measure of ‘occupational skill’ and in others as ‘general standing in the community’. No attempts were ever made to validate either of these definitions. This may be one of the reasons why the official statistics, so influential in their description of health inequality, were less helpful when it came to understanding why it occurs. The Decennial Supplements on OccupationalMortality show the relentless increase of inequality in mortality, which if anything accelerated after the introduction of the UK’s National Health Service in 1946 and the implementation of the raft of policies known as the “Welfare State”. During this period, ‘full employment’ was an objective of government policy (for men only), as were the abolition of the other Five Great Evils of Squalor, Disease, Ignorance and Want. In pursuit of these aims, post war governments of both political colours built new housing and improved schooling as well as maintaining free health care and benefits for the unemployed.

Health inequalities in ageing societies

The age distribution of the world’s population is undergoing a profound transformation. As mortality and fertility have fallen, the age distribution has been shifting gradually to older ages (UN 2007). In the next 45 years, the global population aged 60 years and above will triple. By 2050, one-third of the European population will be aged 60 and above. In lowand middle-income countries, the proportion of older people is growing even faster than in highincome countries (WHO 2008). According to the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, global population ageing makes exploring and understanding social determinants of health among older people an increasingly important challenge (WHO 2008). While this issue was neglected by social epidemiology for a long time, gerontological results indicating that old age is not a uniform phase of life, but characterised by social differences have led to an increasing interest. Today there are some studies describing health inequalities in older populations (e.g. McMunn et al. 2006). Overall, these studies indicate that there is also a social gradient in health among older people, although health inequalities tend to be smaller than among middle-age groups. In the following, three important open issues concerning health inequalities in ageing societies are outlined. First, it can be questioned whether standard measures of socio-economic position like education, occupational class, and income are appropriate for older people. There is an intense discussion in sociology of ageing about concepts and measures of social inequality in older ages. While this debate continues, it has been suggested that (a) studies should focus on a set of measures rather than a single indicator to explore the multi-dimensional nature of socioeconomic position in later life, and (b) studies should include indicators, such as assets or home ownership that can be expected to reflect economic advantages or disadvantages accumulated over the life course (Knesebeck et al. 2007; for a general discussion of measurement of social determinants see also McQueen 2009). Second, as it is still unclear how and why health inequalities vary with age, it seems important to intensify the integration of life course approaches into social epidemiology (Blane 2006; Power and Kuh 2006). These approaches highlight the role of the accumulation of disadvantage over the life course—combining the amount of time different people have spent in more or less disadvantaged circumstances. Health inequality between social groups in this regard is a result of inequalities in the accumulation of social, psychological, and biological advantages and disadvantages over time. Life course approaches help to understand how these social, psychological, and biological factors operating at different stages of the life course contribute to the development of health inequalities in later life. Third, while there are an increasing number of studies describing health inequalities in older ages, there is not much known about the specific factors contributing to these health inequalities. Moreover, it is not certain whether the Olaf von dem Knesebeck is head of the Department of Medical Sociology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. He is interested in research on social determinants of health and health services research, both with a special focus on older ages and international comparisons.

Die Bedeutung sozialer Ungleichheit als Prädiktor für die berufliche Wiedereingliederung von chronischen Rückenschmerzpatienten nach medizinischer Rehabilitation

The question of which factors influence return to work following medical rehabilitative measures in the case of chronic back pain is, in a social political context, of international significance. While psychosocial, socio-economic and demographic factors as well as subjective perceptions of working conditions are individually discussed, the role of social inequality has thus far received little attention. The present paper focuses on the occupational reintegration of patients with chronic dorsopathies following a medical rehabilitative intervention and aims to investigate the influence of predictor variables on successful reintegration. The re-analysis conducted was based on a three-year prospective controlled intervention study with three measurement sessions. The study comprised a sample of 289 patients aged 20 to 64 years who had undergone first-time intervertebral disc operations in the lumbar spine region. Data were collected between March 2002 and February 2005 using a standardized written questionnaire. Winkler's (1998) composite index comprising indicators of occupational position, income and education was employed as a measure of social inequality. Age and sex were also included as independent variables in a binary logistic regression analysis. Of individuals undergoing rehabilitation, those from lower social classes returned to work later than those from higher social classes. Age and sex did not prove to be significant predictors of successful return to work. The probability of successful reintegration into working life increases according to the position within the vertical structure of social class. In light of this result, it can be assumed that not only differential allocation of patients to rehabilitation interventions but also the specific contents of these interventions should be modeled on the basis of economic criteria.

Comparing health inequality in men and women: prospective study of mortality 1986-96

Objectives: To study prospectively the differences in health inequality in men and women from 1986-96 using the Office for National Statistics' longitudinal study and new socioeconomic classification.To assess the relative...

Social Inequalities and Adjustment to School

This study focuses on the relationships between six measures of social inequality – parents’ occupational status, education, marital status and cultural background, neighbourhood quality and child's sex – and child and parent adjustment to the child's schooling. The sample comprised 305 9-11 year olds and their families living in 18 neighbourhoods (primary school districts) of Sydney. The outcome measures were: child's adjustment to school (as perceived by child and mother), parental aspirations and expectations, homework assistance available, parental satisfaction with school services and parental coping strategies for handling school-related problems. Cultural background, child's sex, school type (State/Catholic), local neighbourhood quality, marital status, and religion all predicted to particular adjustment patterns, over and above the effects of other predictor variables. In addition parents rated their children as doing better at school and liking school more than did the children themselves.