Dept, of Sociology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.
BMC Public Health. 2010 May 20;10:264. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-10-264.
We study geographic variation within one community in the City of Calgary using a more fine-grained geographic unit than the Census tract, the Census Dissemination Area (DA). While most Riverside residents consider their neighbourhood to be a fairly cohesive community, we explore the effect of socio-economic variation between these small geographic areas on individuals' self-reported health, net of individual level determinants.
We merge data from the 2001 Census for Riverside, Calgary with a 2004 random telephone survey of Riverside residents. Our data are unique in that we have information on individuals from every DA wholly contained in the Riverside community. These data enable us to conduct multinomial logistic regression analyses of self-reported health using both individual-level and DA-level variables as predictors.
We find significant variation in measures of DA socio-economic status within the Riverside community. We find that individual self-reported health is affected by variation in an index of DA-level socio-economic disadvantage, controlling for individual variation in gender, age, and socio-economic status. We investigate each aspect of the DA index of disadvantage separately, and find that average education and the percent of households that are headed by a lone parent are most important.
These findings demonstrate that, even within a cohesive community, contextual effects on health can be located at a smaller geographic level than the Census tract. Research on the effects of local area socio-economic disadvantage on health that combines administrative and survey data enables researchers to develop more comprehensive measures of social and material deprivation. Our findings suggest that both social and material deprivation affect health at the local level.
我们使用比人口普查区（普查区）更精细的地理单位——人口普查传播区（DA），研究卡尔加里市一个社区内的地域差异。虽然大多数里弗赛德居民认为他们的社区是一个相当有凝聚力的社区，但我们探讨了这些小地理区域之间社会经济差异对个体自我报告健康的影响，个体水平决定因素除外。
我们合并了 2001 年卡尔加里里弗赛德的人口普查数据和 2004 年对里弗赛德居民的随机电话调查。我们的数据是独一无二的，因为我们有每个完全包含在里弗赛德社区内的 DA 个体的信息。这些数据使我们能够使用个体和 DA 水平变量作为预测因子，对自我报告的健康进行多项逻辑回归分析。
我们发现里弗赛德社区内 DA 社会经济地位的测量存在显著差异。我们发现，个体自我报告的健康受到 DA 社会经济劣势指数的变化影响，控制了个体在性别、年龄和社会经济地位方面的变化。我们分别研究了 DA 劣势指数的每个方面，发现平均教育程度和单亲家庭比例对健康的影响最大。
这些发现表明，即使在一个有凝聚力的社区内，健康的背景影响也可以定位在比人口普查区更小的地理水平。结合行政和调查数据研究当地社会经济劣势对健康的影响，使研究人员能够开发更全面的社会和物质剥夺衡量标准。我们的发现表明，社会和物质剥夺都会在当地层面上影响健康。
