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In this second edition, Mel Bartley, Professor Emerita at University College London, presents an extremely interesting overview of our knowledge of social inequalities in health, together with a renewed approach to explanatory theories on them and new research issues in the field.
Despite England's creation of a national health system in 1948 and ambitious policies to reduce poverty in the 2000s, not only has health inequality in that country not been reduced; it has increased. Similar observations may be made for most European countries, although problems of data availability and comparability make it difficult in some cases to track change and assess health policy effectiveness. These findings attest to the need for better understanding of the mechanisms at work in the construction of social inequalities in health and the need to expose the limitations of current policies in order to overcome them.
The first chapters present and discuss the methodological issues involved in defining and measuring inequality, particularly which social position indicators to choose and which social categories to take into account. Bartley then presents the main explanatory theories and models found in the specialized literature, highlighting the diverse range of independent variables they identify....