Impacts of social class & employment (4)

• Artefact explanations

  Suggests that links between class and health are artificial or the inability to measure social phenomena accurately
• Artefact explanations are disrupted by vast amounts of evidence that clearly proves health inequality exists
• Natural/social selection experience


  • Inequality is caused by biological inferiority, is natural and inevitable
• Cultural/behavioral explanationsIndibehavioural

  • Individual behaviour and culture affects perceivement of health and how societal behaviour and cultural traditions affects the way treatment, symptoms and disease disease are fixed
• Cultural/behavioral explanations are firmly established in medical circles as the main causes of social class differences in health
• Materialist/structural explanations


  • Economical, social and political factors can determine social distribution of health & illness. poor working & living conditions directly influence illness
• Psycho-social/social capital explanations

  • widening of income inequality, accompanied by work intensification and unemployment has led to increased levels of stress, anxiety, insecurity and depression,
• Men

  32% more likely to experience workplace injury
• Employees

  59% will take time off result of workplace injury
• Workplace injuries for men

  Decreasing
• Workplace injuries for women

  Increasing
• Rate of injury for shift workers

  Double than that of non shift workers
• Night shift

  60% increased risk of feeling fatigued compared to day shift
• Upper Class


  Those who own economic resources that create political pull through economic power
• Middle Class


  Groups that have a qualification that attracts wage: better working conditions, e,g teachers, health care
• Lower class


  Unskilled manual / non-manual blue or white-collar workers that gain work through labour
• Socioeconomic status


  Ranks people by income, education, and occupation levels into groups of high-low. Class inequality is based off SES