BACKGROUND Since individual-level income is difficult to collect, investigators often rely on group-based measures derived from census data. No study has assessed the use of residential property values as an indicator of individual material circumstances. We aimed to compare two proxy indicators of material circumstances, one based on residential value and the other on median census tract incom...

BACKGROUND The prevalence and correlates of depression vary across countries. Contextual factors such as country-level income or income inequalities have been hypothesised to contribute to these differences. AIMS To investigate associations of depression with socioeconomic factors at the country level (income inequality, gross national income) and individual (education, employment, assets and...

BACKGROUND Few studies have investigated how area-level deprivation influences the relationship between individual disadvantage and suicide mortality. The aim of this study was to examine individual measures of material and social disadvantage in relation to suicide mortality in Canada and to determine whether these relationships were modified by area deprivation. METHODS Using the 1991-2001 ...

Decompositions by population subgroups and by income sources represent the traditional techniques for decomposing income inequality. Compared with the classical methodologies, the regression-based method gives the opportunity of quantifying the contribution to the inequality of a set of factors, while taking the correlations among them into account. In this framework, two regression-based decom...

State-level income inequality has been found to have an effect on individual health outcomes, even when controlled for important individual-level variables such as income, education, age, and gender. The effect of income inequality on health may not be immediate and may, in fact, have a substantial lag time between exposure to inequality and eventual health outcome. We used the 2006 American Co...