Housing as a Socio-Economic Determinant of Health: Assessing Research Needs

One way to approach the links between socioeconomic status and health has been proposed by Lynch and Kaplan (1997), who call for an “epidemiology of everyday life.” Systematic social differences in health may be a response to systematic differences in the quality and stressfulness of daily life. If so, housing is one way to understand socio-economic geographies of everyday life and their influence on health. Among the affluent countries of the world, researchers have observed for over a century a strong relationship between an individual’s socio-economic status and his or her health status. The relationship appears to be independent of the measure of socio-economic status (income, education, job class) and of the type of disease.