The Relationship between Health Status and Social Determinants of Health - Essay Example

INVESTIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HEALTH STATUS AND SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH By Presented to Descriptive Statistics Out of the 250 respondents sampled, 158 were White, 4 of mixed racial origin, 2 Black Caribbean, 63 Black Africans, 2 Indians, 11 Pakistanis, 1 Bangladeshi, and 9 were of other racial origins. Based on the number of times members of each racial background visited the GP, Whites had an average 0.47 (std. dev. = 0.763) times, Black Africans 0.60 (std. dev. = 0.943), Pakistanis 0.36 (std. dev. = 0.809), and participants with mixed racial background and other races had 0.50 (std. dev. = 0.577) and 1.00 (std. dev. = 1.323) respectively. The Bangladeshi and Blacks from the Caribbean had not visited the GP at all. Ten of the male participants were current smokers, 16 were ex-smokers, and 55 had never engaged in smoking. Seven of the female participants were current smokers, 23 were ex-smokers while 142 had never smoked. On the pain scale, the 80 males in the sample indicated that pain interfered with their work/ activities by 4.33% (std. dev. = 0.938) and the 173 females were averagely 4.28% (std. dev. = 1.020) affected by the pain. Males had a slightly higher SF 12 health status score (mean = 45.94, std. dev. = 5.46) than females (mean = 44.48, std. dev. = 6.32). SF 12 health status was also fairly normally distributed, as can be seen in the below P-P plot. Fig. 1. Q-Q plot: SF 12 health status scores. Inferential Statistics The correlation analysis indicated that an individual’s occupation was not significantly correlated with SF health status score (ρ = -0.043, p = 0.529). Equally, there was no significant difference between the various groups in terms of the number of times they had visited the GP (F249, 0.05 = 0.914, p = 0.496). In the chi square test, the groups were significantly different (χ2 253, 0.05 = 0.014). The differences in the scores corresponding to how pain affected the participant’s activities were not significantly different (t = 0.320, p = 0.749). Equally, there were no significant differences in participants’ health statuses based on gender (t = 1.860, p = 0.065). Choosing Inferential Statistics Hypotheses. The following hypotheses were developed: H1: There is no statistically significant difference between the mean GP attendance score in the different ethnic groups H2: The mean GP attendance score is statistically higher among the White participants than among the other ethnic groups. The levels of measurement used were different across various variables. For the main variables, individual reasons were considered as described below. The health activities (including all corresponding components) were measured at the ordinal level. This decision was made since the scores follow a hierarchy that does not regard the difference between successive scores, but is cognizant of the increasing or decreasing order as higher or lower scores are awarded. Ethnicity was regarded at a nominal scale. The various racial backgrounds of respondents were coded for entry into SPSS. This step is necessary as it makes the analysis of text possible. The codes assigned against each ethnic group did not regard the order of each score, thus the scores are nominal. References Bambra, C., Gibson, M., Sowden, A., Wright, K., Whitehead, M. and Petticrew, M. 2010. Tackling the wider social determinants of health and health inequalities: Evidence from systematic reviews. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. 64: 284-291. Burdine, J. N., Felix, M. R., Abel, A. L., Wiltraut, C. J. and Musselman, Y. J. 2000. The SF-12 as a population health measure: An exploratory examination of potential for application. Health Services Research. 35(4): 885-904. Chapman, A. R. 2013. The social determinants of health, health equity, and human rights. Health and Human Rights. 12(2): 17-30. Field, A. 2013. Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics (4th Ed.). Sage Publications Ltd: London. Gore, D. and Kothari, A. Social determinants of health in Canada: Are healthy living initiatives there yet? A policy analysis. International Journal of Equity in Health. 11(1): 41-55. Pallant, J. 2010. SPSS survival manual: A step by step guide to data analysis using SPSS for Windows (4th Ed.). Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill. Telfair, J. and Shelton, T. L. 2012. Educational attainment as a social determinant of health. North Carolina Medical Journal. 73(5): 358-365. Read More