Health Psychology
Discuss the evidence for the existence of social health inequalities in the UK and discuss why these inequalities may occur.
Definition of health varies depending on people’s approaches to their well-being. Some would have mainly medical approach; to say that, health is lack of disease or illness, whereas the others would have broader the approach to health, like “State of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO, 1946).
For many years, the distribution of health state between populations was expressed in terms of ideas on “inequality”. The main core studies of inequalities in health have been referred to social and economic circumstances of individuals. A variety of factors can establish the socio-economic status (SES): income, wealth, type of housing tenure, education, style of consumption, mode of behavior, social origins, family and local connections. All this factors are interconnected and strongly correlate with illness and mortality. Moreover, not a single factor should be considered as adequate on its own. Therefore, more likely one of the influential factors on health would be behavioral, including consistency of diet, exercise, smoking and other individual life style factors. Second more influential factor is psychosocial, which includes such cognitive processes like self-efficacy, self- esteem and perceived control (Siegrist and Marmot, 2004).
One of the earliest studies in Britain in 1977, Black Report (Townsend and Davidson, 1982) summarized evidences of health social inequalities based on use of occupation as an indicator of social class. For the class stratifications, the (I-V) Registrar General’s categories have been used and they have been updated into I-VIII categories: 1) Higher managerial & professional; 2) Lower managerial & professional; 3) Intermediate; 4) Small employers & own accounts; 5) Lower supervisory, craft & related...
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