Social Inequality and Smoking
Investigation of the ‘health gaps’ between
advantaged and disadvantaged populations has been a common theme in
health research, with much work indicating that socio-economic and ethnic
disparities in health, have changed little or widened in recent years.
However, work on the social dimensions of health and ill health have
tended to use mortality as a health measure. Work by researchers in
the Environment and Health research group has focused on an alternative
measure of the health gap: smoking behaviour. While smoking rates have
decreased in many countries this has been less true of New Zealand.
While evidence suggests a general decline in smoking rates in New Zealand,
during the 1990s this decline slowed or halted for certain ethnic groups
with the result that ethnic differences in smoking rates have increased.
Smoking Research at Canterbury
Work has focused on New Zealand where the degree of social inequality is among the highest in the world (Barnett, 2000) and in Scotland, a country with particularly high smoking rates (Pearce, 2003; Pearce, Boyle and Flowerdew, 2003). More recently, the focus for the research team has been the effects of social inequality on ethnic differences in smoking behaviour in New Zealand (Barnett, Moon and Kearns, 2004). Current work has incorporated a temporal dimension by examining the role of changing social inequalities on smoking behaviour (Barnett, Pearce and Moon, 2004)and is presently investigating the influence of ethnic residential segregation on Maori smoking rates (Moon, Barnett and Pearce, forthcoming).
Staff involved
- Assoc Prof Ross Barnett
- Dr Jamie Pearce
- Prof Graham Moon