IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v45y1997i1p3-14.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Morbidity and Irish Catholic descent in Britain: An ethnic and religious minority 150 years on

Author

Listed:
  • Abbotts, Joanne
  • Williams, Rory
  • Ford, Graeme
  • Hunt, Kate
  • West, Patrick

Abstract

Ethnic and religious minorities often suffer disadvantages both in socio-economic status and in health. Data from the West of Scotland Twenty-07 study suggest some differences in morbidity between those descended from Irish Catholic migrants of the great emigration from 1840 onwards and others. Catholic religion of at least one parent or at birth is used here as a proxy measure to indicate Irish Catholic descent, on the basis of estimates of sensitivity and specificity in the local area. Higher proportions of "Catholics" are in manual social classes. Differences between "Catholics" and "non-Catholics" in one or more age cohorts are observed for the following aspects of health and physical development: general and physical health (self-assessed health, number of symptoms, accidents), psychological distress (depression, anxiety, number of psychosomatic symptoms), impairments and disabilities (sight, hearing, wearing dentures, disability), and physical measures (height, waist-to-hip ratio, lung function). Furthermore, for all aspects except hearing, wearing dentures and number of psychosomatic symptoms, significant differences remain after accounting for sex and social class. For each measure where a difference is observed, it is those respondents with a Catholic parent or who were born Catholic who experience poorer health or physical development. This suggests that those of Irish Catholic descent are at some disadvantage compared with the rest of the population, with respect to health as well as social class, 150 years after the start of the main migration.

Suggested Citation

  • Abbotts, Joanne & Williams, Rory & Ford, Graeme & Hunt, Kate & West, Patrick, 1997. "Morbidity and Irish Catholic descent in Britain: An ethnic and religious minority 150 years on," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 3-14, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:45:y:1997:i:1:p:3-14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(96)00302-4
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. repec:asg:wpaper:1020 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. O'Reilly, Dermot & Rosato, Michael, 2010. "Dissonances in self-reported health and mortality across denominational groups in Northern Ireland," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 71(5), pages 1011-1017, September.
    3. repec:asg:wpaper:1042 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. O'Reilly, Dermot & Rosato, Michael, 2008. "Religious affiliation and mortality in Northern Ireland: Beyond Catholic and Protestant," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 66(7), pages 1637-1645, April.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:45:y:1997:i:1:p:3-14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.