Measures Of Social Disadvantage Research Articles

Evaluating Educational Interventions Using Multilevel Growth Curves: The Case of Reading Recovery

Educational interventions are notoriously difficult to evaluate. This article describes an application of multilevel modelling to repeated measures as part of an evaluation of Reading Recovery in England. Growth curve and multivariate models are applied to the within and between school aspects of the design, which also included a phonological intervention. Reading Recovery is shown to be effective in the short term but not in the long term. A measure of social disadvantage is a powerful predictor of reading growth in the long term.

Child health statistical review, 1996.

There is much evidence that the children born in the last decade of the 20th century are healthier and living longer than children born earlier this century, and that children born too small or too soon are now more likely to reach adulthood than similar children born 10 or 20 years ago. Yet measures of social disadvantage (poverty, underachievement in education, lone parenthood) are increasing, putting this generation of children at higher risk of morbidity later in life.

Information Inequality and Broadband Network Access: an Analysis of Australian Household Data

There has been considerable debate in Australia concerning the social and economic effects of telecommunications carrier investment in broadband network infrastructure. Whether particular groups within networked communities are unable or unwilling to subscribe to broadband services is an important policy issue. This paper sets out to identify metropolitan households that are less likely to subscribe to services and examines whether there exists a systematic link between subscription interest and measures of social disadvantage. Analysis of stated-preference subscription intentions data, obtained from an Australia-wide survey of 715 households, shows that there is potential for the new communication technology to create information inequality.

Unemployment, socioenvironmental factors, and coronary heart disease in Scotland.

Scotland, which has one of the highest death rates in the world from coronary heart disease, also has considerable regional variation in mortality from this cause. The relation between standardised mortality ratios for coronary deaths (1979-83) for 56 local government districts and a range of socioeconomic factors from the 1981 Census as well as climatic factors and water hardness were investigated. Strong associations were seen with several measures of social disadvantage, the strongest being with percentage of male unemployment. A fitted multiple regression model with mortality from coronary heart disease in men found independent effects of two social variables (percentage male unemployment and percentage social class III-V) and one climatic factor (rainfall). The model explained much (73%) of the geographical variation in mortality from coronary heart disease, but part of the geographical pattern, in particular some of the east-west gradient in mortality, remained unexplained by it. Explanations for the geographical variation and the association with economic factors are currently being sought in terms of individual risk factors in a large screening study, the Scottish Heart Health Study.

Broken Homes: Stable Risk, Changing Reasons, Changing Forms

A merged sample of eight of the General Social Surveys provided the data for analyzing stability and change in childhood homes since the beginning of the century. Cohort membership and two measures of social disadvantage were used as explanatory variables in analysis of the risk of growing up in a broken home and of the living arrangements of children with broken homes. The risk of a broken home by age 16 proved to be stable across cohorts and greater for those from disadvantaged homes. Stability of the risk arose from the balance between homes broken by parental death and homes broken by divorce or separation. Across cohorts mothers were the chief homemaking parents in broken homes and, except among nonwhites, this proportion increased. Fathers were remarried more often than mothers, although mothers in more advantaged homes were increasingly more likely to be remarried. Stepfathers came to outnumber stepmothers in later cohorts.