Title: Measuring and Analysing Socioeconomic Inequalities in Health
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: Aims and Objectives The aim of this programme is to improve methodology for the measurement and analysis of health and inequalities in health using observational data with particular emphasis on improving our understanding of causes and informing strategies for intervention. Our objectives are: 1. To improve population health outcomes through conduct and translation of research based on the evaluation of policy or large-scale intervention. 2. To maximise the use of existing routine, linked and population-sampled data sources and, in so doing, enhance the return on the investment made in these resources. 3. To inform intervention strategy through research enhancing our understanding of health, inequalities in health and the determinants of health. 4. To build capacity in the measurement and analysis of inequalities in health using observational data. Research plan and methodology The purpose of this programme is to develop, adapt and apply appropriate statistical methods and novel study designs for the analysis of health inequalities, taking advantage of the linkage of new datasets and improved analytical capability. The joint focus on methodology and application, and proposed collaborations internally, nationally and internationally, ensure we are grounded in real-world applications assessing inequalities or informing the reduction of inequalities. Much of our work uses linked data from local, national and international longitudinal studies and surveys. Our proposals include the use of novel linkages such as the linkage of education and unemployment data to population health data. We are in an excellent position to take advantage of the linkage of health and social data for three main reasons: we benefit from our location in Scotland with a long history of high quality routinely collected and linked health data and have experience in analysing the same going back more than 25 years; we have expertise in the analysis of linked health and social datasets from other countries, particularly Finland, Sweden and Norway, going back over 10 years; and we have considerable experience working with other datasets that link individual social data to routine data systems including the Scottish Health Survey, Scottish Birth Records and the Scottish Longitudinal Study. The work of this programme is organised around three themes: As more data sources come on line, in part through initiatives such as the Farr Institute for Health Informatics Research and the Administrative Data Research Centres, our first theme ‘Health inequalities and linked data analysis’ is exploring their potential to improve our understanding of the patterning of health and to identify points for intervention. Our second theme, ‘Natural experiments from observational data’, is working on improving the extent to which we can be confident that associations based on observational data are causal which will in turn lead to an improved understanding of how we can intervene to improve health and reduce inequalities. The third theme, ‘Enhancing cohort, survey and routine data sources’, is combining data from cross-sectional and longitudinal sources, largely by the innovative use of multiple imputation, to increase our power for analysis leading to improvements in our understanding of health and its determinants.


Research activity codes: 1.4 METHODOLOGIES AND MEASUREMENTS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE