Health inequalities: what’s going on in youth?

Abstract

Notes how the 1980 Black Report on the extent and causes of health inequalities in the UK made little mention of how these issues affect youth or young people. Questions the conclusion of the Black Report that health inequalities are a pervasive feature at all ages. Describes the “West of Scotland Twenty‐07 Study: Health in the Community” being carried out by the MRC Medical Sociology Unit, which tracked around 1,000 people in each of three age cohorts, the youngest of which was aged 15 when first interviewed in 1987. Asks questions about health, family life, life at school, leisure patterns and health‐related behaviours like exercise, diet, smoking and drug use, and about their attitudes and concerns; summarizes some of the results from this study. Concludes that in early youth, around the time of secondary education, there is less evidence of class differences in health than at any other point in the life‐course, including the earlier period of childhood, and that health is more strongly linked to where young people are heading than where they have come from.