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Social class, Social explanation - Coggle Diagram
Social class
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Occupation
In 2000, men from manual working backgrounds were 52% more likely to smoke than non-manual working men and manual working women were 36% more likely than non-manual working women (Taylor and Field, 2007).
Social class is often measured by the occupation of a person and the ranking they hold within their job (Taylor and Field, 2007)
There are 6 occupational social classes: professional, managerial and technical, skilled non-manual, skilled manual, partly skilled, and unskilled (Taylor and Field, 2007).
The occupation of a person is recorded on their death certificate, this data adds to mortality statistics and measures a person's occupational class on death (Taylor and Field, 2007).
The occupation recorded is the one the person most recently had upon death. This can result in artefact statistics about social class and mortality as the person could have had a career within the top three occupational social classes, but in retirement, they went on to do an unskilled job, leading to being classed in the bottom class of occupation (Bloor, Samphier and Prior, 1987).
Life-style
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Typically, working-class people are less receptive to the dangers of unhealthy lifestyle choices such as smoking (Taylor, 1999)
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Graham (1994) said that smoking is influenced by material factors. For example: not having the funds to get help with caring for small children and taking up smoking is a way of having a legitimate break from the stresses.
This is a behavioural explanation as material factors can create stress in life. Another example of material factors influencing behavioural choices would be an unhealthy diet; not having the money to eat healthily as junk food is cheaper (Laaksonen et al., 2005).
Poverty
The impact of poverty on health is made evident by people in poorer countries having worse health than wealthier countries, with worse conditions and less access to health care (Thompson, Hickey and Thompson, 2019).
Shaw et al.(2005) compared the life expectancy between affluent areas and poor areas in the UK over 10 years, between 1992 and 2003. The biggest difference found between the lowest life expectancy area (Glasglow City) and the highest (East Dorset) was 11 years difference for men and 8.4 years for women (Taylor and Field, 2007).
This shows that geographical location has an impact on mortality rates and contributes to proving the North-South divide.
From 2017 to 2019, the North-East had the lowest life expectancy for both males and females, and life expectancy at birth was also lower in the North-East compared to Wales and Northern Ireland but higher than Scotland (ONS.gov.uk, 2021).
Men living in the South of the UK had life expectancies at birth averaging about 80 years, unlike males from the midlands and the North averaging under 80 years (ONS.gov.uk, 2021).
NHS
All UK citizens have access to free health care via the NHS but that does not mean that the healthcare system in the UK has not got any inequalities (Macionis and Plummer, 2012).
During the 'Thatcher years', private health care was encouraged (Macionis and Plummer, 2012).
Thatcher and the government ignored and marginalised the concerns brought to light by the report such as recommendations to reduce child poverty and increase benefits. The poverty rates in the UK rose from 6.7% in 19975 to 12.0% in 1985, nearly doubling (Scott-Samuel et al., 2014).
The richest 0.01% had x28 the average income of the UK population in 1978 and this increased by 70 times under Thatcher's government (Scott-Samuel et al., 2014).
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The Upper class have the option to get better health care by going private and the lower working class can only rely on the NHS (Macionis and Plummer, 2012), which is underfunded (NHS Support Federation, n.d.).
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All of these are structural and material inequalities due to the structure of society and the distribution of wealth.
Social explanation
The social explanation for health and social class is that people are lower class due to their health status (Senior and Viveash, 1998).
Connelly and Crown (1994) reported on the connection between homelessness and schizophrenia; concluding that homelessness does not cause schizophrenia, but schizophrenia causes homelessness.
Although this might be the case some of the time, it does not prove the social explanation for ill health amongst the lower class. For example, people who are socially disadvantaged suffer from poor dental health due to dentist costs in the UK being expensive (Public Health England, 2021).
Between 2017 and 2018, the NHS spent £3.6 billion on dental care in England and spends 25% more on those in the lowest income quintile than to those in the highest (Public Health England, 2021).
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