IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography

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IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography

Call for papers

International Seminar on The Emergence of Social Differences in Mortality: Time Trends, Causes, and Reactions
Alghero, Italy 29-30 May 2008

Organized by the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography in cooperation with the Società Italiana di Demografia Storica (SIDES), the University of Sassari and the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI).

Since the 1980s, socioeconomic inequality in adult mortality has become a continuous topic of academic interest and a key issue of attention to policy makers in many European countries. A number of studies reported a widening of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; as a consequence, trends over time in social class differences in mortality developed into an important political issue. To inform policy makers, the descriptive study of past trends in socioeconomic inequalities in mortality became a booming business for epidemiologists and demographers (see for example Mackenbach et al. 2003; Kunst et al. 2004). The interest in the development over time of the link between socioeconomic position (SEP) and mortality was further stimulated by a new theoretical approach of the socioeconomic differences in mortality. Whereas mainstream research in epidemiology and public health focuses on specific causal behavioural and biological mechanisms that link SEP with health and mortality, Link and Phelan’s theory of “fundamental social causes” (Link and Phelan 1995, 1996) argued that some more general mechanisms are responsible for the way in which “specific and varied mechanisms are continuously generated over historical time in such a way that the direction of the enduring association is preserved” (Lutfey and Freese 2005: 1327). The fundamental social causes theory is founded on the assumption that socioeconomic inequalities in mortality have remained essentially constant over historical time. The main conclusion of Link and Phelan’s theory, that is the empirical question whether SEP gradients in mortality indeed have persisted over a broad historical period and over a variety of places, has not been verified in a satisfactory way. For a large part this is due to the limited time horizon of the studies that contain information on trends in SEP inequalities in mortality. For most countries in the Western World, with the exception of the UK, information on trends started only in the 1960s. Historical and epidemiological studies presenting information going further back in time were based mainly on very limited local and crude data, making it difficult to take the effect of the environment into account.

In this seminar we intend to add to the knowledge of the causes of the long-term trends in social inequality in adult mortality by studying data for a variety of settings and regions for which we have data by social class over a considerable amount of time. By analysing mortality for men and women separately we are able to find out whether the relationship between mortality, social class and gender has changed over time. A central issue will be the question whether locality or social class were the main factors determining group differences in mortality (social context). We are particularly interested in the mechanisms between socioeconomic position and mortality, i.e. whether the gradient is due to income and wealth, housing, education, etc. To this aim, we will seek for the development of multi-level and event history models that will account for the temporal variations of the contextual effects over long periods of time. We will also pay attention to the way in which in various periods the academic and political world stimulated research in this field and or reacted to research findings. This seminar aims to bring together historians, epidemiologists, and demographers bringing new information on time trends in mortality from existing and newly collected data, making use of a variety of methods, as well as political scientists with studies on the reception of and political reactions on the part of labour unions, political parties, and governments to information on social class mortality differences in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contributions might be based on re-analysis of published statistical data, on analyses on newly-collected information from micro-data and on more qualitative sources.

The IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography invites researchers in the field to submit a 200-word abstract and curriculum vitae before 1 October 2007 to Frans van Poppel (poppel@nidi.nl) with a copy to Madeleine Jarl (Madeleine.Jarl@ekh.lu.se). Abstracts must be submitted in English only and the working language at the meeting is English. Invitations to attend the seminar will be issued, based on the outcome of submitted abstracts, by 1 November 2007. Participants will be expected to submit their complete paper by 1 May 2008.

The conference will be limited to a maximum of 20 contributed papers. Proceedings, an edited volume or a special journal issue will be produced after the seminar. Seminar organizers will pay for expenses at the meeting location for all participants but there are no funds to cover participants’ airfares. Participants are therefore encouraged to seek their own funding for travel.

For further information, please contact Frans van Poppel (poppel@nidi.nl).

References:
Kunst, Anton E., Vivian Bos, Paula Santana, Tapani Valkonen, Johan P. Mackenbach, Otto Andersen, Mario Cardano, Giuseppe Costa, Seeromanie Harding, Örjan Hemström, Richard Layte, Enrique Regidor and Alison Reid (2004). Monitoring of trends in socioeconomic inequalities in mortality. Experiences from a European project. Demographic Research, Special collection 2, Determinants of diverging trends in mortality, April, 229-254.
Link, Bruce G. and Jo C. Phelan (1995). Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 35: 80-94.
Link, Bruce G. and Jo C. Phelan (1996). Understanding Sociodemographic Differences in Health--The Role of Fundamental Social Causes. American Journal of Public Health 86: 471-473.
Lutfey, Karen and Jeremy Freese (2005). Toward some fundamentals of fundamental causality: Socioeconomic status and health in the routine clinic visit for diabetes. American Journal of Sociology 110: 1326-1372.
Mackenbach, Johan P. Vivian Bos, Otto Andersen, Mario Cardano, Giuseppe Costa, Seeromanie Harding, Alison Reid, Örjan Hemström, Richard Layte, Enrique Regidor, Tapani Valkonen, Kunst, Anton E. (2003). Widening socioeconomic inequalities in mortality in six European countries. International Journal of Epidemiology 32: 830-837.

Organizers:
Frans van Poppel, Tommy Bengtsson, Alain Gagnon, Marco Breschi and Lucia Pozzi

Sponsors:
IUSSP, the Società Italiana di Demografia Storica (SIDES), the University of Sassari and the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI).