Lee Williamson

Is changing status through housing tenure associated with changes in mental health? Results from the British Household Panel Survey

Background Actual or perceived status, such as housing tenure, may impact on health through stress-inducing social comparisons. Studies of how status change impacts mental health change are rare but important because they are less prone to confounding. Methods We used data from the British Household Panel Survey to compare psychological distress in local authority renters who opted to buy their home under the UKs Right to Buy (RTB) policy versus those who continued to rent the same (social non-mover (SNM)) or a different (social mover (SM)) local authority property or who bought privately (owner mover (OM)). General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) scores before and after any change in tenure and/or address were compared across groups using a difference-in-difference approach. Results Individuals who moved house (bought or rented) were younger while those who bought (the same or different house) were better off, more likely to be employed, and had higher educational qualifications. Individuals who bought their home (under RTB or privately) had lower distress scores from the outset. Individuals who moved house (bought or rented) experienced a rise in distress prior to moving that was no longer evident 1 year after the move. There was no evidence that changing tenure reduced psychological distress comparing (difference (95% CI)) average GHQ score 2 years preaddress and 1 year postaddress/tenure change in RTB vs SNM, SM, OM: −0.08 (−0.68 to 0.51), 0.16 (−0.70 to 1.01) and −0.17 (−1.28 to 0.94), respectively). Conclusions Changing tenure under RTB did not, on average, impact psychological distress, suggesting that this status change did not change mental health.

Automatic Methods for Coding Historical Occupation Descriptions to Standard Classifications

The increasing availability of digitised registration records presents a significant opportunity for research in many fields including those of human geography, genealogy and medicine. Re-examining original records allows researchers to study relationships between factors such as occupation, cause of death, illness and geographic region. This can be facilitated by coding these factors to standard classifications. This chapter describes work to develop a method for automatically coding the occupations from 29 million Scottish birth, death and marriage records, containing around 50 million occupation descriptions, to standard classifications. A range of approaches using text processing and supervised machine learning is evaluated, achieving classification performance of 75 % micro-precision/recall, 61 % macro-precision and 66 % macro-recall on a smaller test set. Further development that may be needed for classification of the full data set is discussed.

Automatic Methods for Coding Historical Occupation Descriptions to Standard

This book addresses the problems that are encountered, and solutions that have been proposed, when we aim to identify people and to reconstruct populations under conditions where information is scarce, ambiguous, fuzzy and sometimes erroneous. The process from handwritten registers to a reconstructed digitized population consists of three major phases, reflected in the three main sections of this book. The first phase involves transcribing and digitizing the data while structuring the information in a meaningful and efficient way. In the second phase, records that refer to the same person or group of persons are identified by a process of linkage. In the third and final phase, the information on an individual is combined into a reconstruction of their life course. The studies and examples in this book originate from a range of countries, each with its own cultural and administrative characteristics, and from medieval charters through historical censuses and vital registration, to the modern issue of privacy preservation. Despite the diverse places and times addressed, they all share the study of fundamental issues when it comes to model reasoning for population reconstruction and the possibilities and limitations of information technology to support this process. It is thus not a single discipline that is involved in such an endeavor. Historians, social scientists, and linguists represent the humanities through their knowledge of the complexity of the past, the limitations of sources, and the possible interpretations of information. The availability of big data from digitized archives and the need for complex analyses to identify individuals calls for the involvement of computer scientists. With contributions from all these fields, often in direct cooperation, this book is at the heart of the digital humanities, and will hopefully offer a source of inspiration for future investigations.

Socioeconomic disadvantage, fetal environment and child development: linked Scottish administrative records based study

BackgroundCognitive development in childhood is negatively affected by socioeconomic disadvantage. This study examined whether differences in fetal environment might mediate the association between family socioeconomic position and child development.MethodsData were linked from the Scottish Longitudinal Study, maternity inpatient records and the Child Health Surveillance Programme – Pre School for 32,238 children. The outcome variables were based on health visitor assessment of gross motor, hearing and language, vision and fine motor, and social development. Socioeconomic position was measured using parental social class and highest qualification attained. Random-effects logistic regression models were estimated to account for multiple reviews and familial clustering. Mediation analysis was conducted using the Karlson-Holm-Breen method.ResultsHearing and language, vision and fine motor, and social development were associated with lower parental social class and lower parental educational qualifications after adjustment for fetal environment. Fetal environment partially mediated the estimated effect of having parents without educational qualifications for hearing and language (β = 0·15; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0·07, 0·23), vision and fine motor (β = 0·19; CI = 0·10, 0·28) and social development (β = 0·14; CI = 0·03 to 0·25).ConclusionsSocioeconomic position predicted hearing and language, vision and fine motor, and social development but not gross motor development. For children of parents without educational qualifications, fetal environment appears to contribute to a part of the socioeconomic gradient in child development abnormalities but post-natal environment appears to still explain the majority of the gradient and for other children most of it.

‘A confession of ignorance’: deaths from old age and deciphering cause-of-death statistics in Scotland, 1855–1949

A large amount of the research undertaken in an attempt to discover the reasons underlying the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mortality decline in Britain has relied on the statistics published by the Registrars General. The processes by which individual causes of death are recorded and then processed in order to create the statistics are not, however, well understood. In this article, the authors build on previous work to piece together a time series of causes of death for Scotland, which removes many of the discontinuities encountered in the published statistics that result from the Registrar General deciding to update the nosology, or classification system, which was being used to compile his figures. Having regrouped individual causes of death to ‘smooth’ the time series, the authors use the new groups to examine the changing causes of death in Scotland for selected age groups, before turning to undertake a detailed examination of mortality amongst those aged 55 or more. The authors find that when deaths from ‘old age’ in the latter age group are separated from other ‘ill-defined’ causes, it becomes obvious that there was a ‘rebranding’ of cause of death. The authors then use individual-level data from two Scottish communities to further dissect the roles played by ‘informants’ and ‘doctors’ in this rebranding, in order to see how these roles may have altered over time and what the consequences might be for ones view of how mortality changed in Scotland between 1855 and 1949. Finally, the authors argue that their findings have important implications for some of historical demographys most prominent theories: the McKeown thesis and the theory of epidemiological transition.

Exploiting historical registers: Automatic methods for coding c19th and c20th cause of death descriptions to standard classifications

Within the total survey error paradigm (TSE) one no rmally tries to identify the principal sources of e rror in a survey, e.g. errors due to coverage, sampling, nonresponse, measurement, processing and imputation, a nd of course issues pertaining to validity or relevanc e. The impacts of these errors are mitigated when p ossible, or at least we should try to characterize them and their sources (Groves, 2004). Statistical disclosur e control (SDC) methods, i.e. measures taken to protect confi de tial data can be viewed as an additional error s ou ce, and in some cases this is exactly how risk reductio n is achieved, e.g. noise is purposely added to mic ro or tabular data. Similarly, when protection is achieve d by suppressing data, uncertainty is introduced. Consequently, Karr (2012) includes disclosure limit ation error as a component of TSE at the conceptual level. This uncertainty may consist of an increase in variances but may also introduce bias in estimat es stemming from a protected data set. The main differ ence compared to other error sources is that the producers of official statistics are in a position t assess the increase of uncertainty and decide ho w much to add and attempt to do so in a controlled manner. Op timally, uncertainty is added while at the same tim e the utility of the data is preserved, thus there is an intention from the producer to find a balance betwe n risk and utility.

Intergenerational replacement and migration in the countries and regions of the United Kingdom, 1971-2009.

This article uses a recently proposed measure, the overall replacement ratio or ORR, to assess the extent to which migration alters intergenerational replacement within the United Kingdom. The UK as a whole can be seen to experience ‘replacement migration’ as immigration compensates for fertility below the replacement level. However, the article shows that the impact of migration differs radically in the different regions of the country. South East England experiences very substantial immigration from both the rest of the UK and overseas, far more than is needed for intergenerational replacement, whereas most of the rest of the UK sees little or no net immigration and the ORR remains below the replacement level.