TRENDS IN HEALTH INEQUALITIES
TRENDS IN HEALTH
INEQUALITIES
Using a series of national-level data sets, we describe trends in health inequalities beginning in
1980 among adults aged 20 and older. We selected 1980 as the starting point because that
was the year of the landmark Inequalities in
Health: The Black Report and the Health Divide
(79), which drew international attention to the
issue of health inequalities. The Black Report was
a major turning point in the United Kingdom,
and its influence was felt in the United States as
well.
The data are age-adjusted and stratified
by gender, race/ethnicity, or SES, where
population subgroup information is available.
Race/ethnicity data are presented to the extent that data were collected with large enough
sample sizes for analysis. In the United States,
data for American Indians are not presented,
despite documented health inequalities in that
population compared with national averages.
For the United States, SES is defined by educational attainment: those who have less than
a high-school education, those with a highschool diploma, and those with some college
education. For the United Kingdom, SES is
defined by social class, based on the Office of
National Statistics socio-economic classification (NS-SEC). Social class is hierarchically
structured where class I is the highest social
class and class VII is the lowest (83). It is important to note that SES in the United States
is not completely analogous to social class i
