Social inequality, population health, and housing: Towards a social geography of health

This dissertation brings social geography and population health together to argue that the key social and psychosocial factors shaping health status concern power relations, identity, social status, and control over life circumstances in the course of everyday life. Specifically, the social gradient in health status is attributable not only to individuals' absolute material circumstances (e.g., income), but also to their relative material circumstances, or the social meanings they attach to their material circumstances in the course of everyday life. A major contribution of this work, therefore, is the development of a theoretical argument to explain the ways in which. power relations, identity, status, and control could produce social gradients in health status.;This reading of social geography and its potential intersection with population health finds that housing, a significant factor in the generation of social inequality second only to inequalities arising in the realm of work, has been neglected in population health research. Similarly, in the sizable literature on the relationship between housing and health, little consideration is given to housing as a factor in the generation of social inequalities, and as a crucial nexus for the differentially distributed stresses of everyday life.;The dissertation takes on an empirical case study of relationships between housing and health in two Vancouver neighbourhoods to investigate housing as a nexus for the multiple, overlapping stressors of day-to-day life, and their relationship to health status. The results of a social survey of the two neighbourhoods (n = 206 and n = 322), and a series of depth interviews (n = 8 for each neighbourhood) find individuals' social status, social support, coping, and stress measures to be associated with self-reported general and mental health status, in addition to their satisfaction with various aspects of their dwelling, the degree to which they invest their home with meaning, and the degree to which their home is a site for the exercise of control. The depth interview findings contextualize these factors, showing that home is indeed an important site to people for the exercise of control and the investment of meaning, especially as a reflection of their identity. These results are broadly consistent with the theoretical framework for housing and population health proposed, and signal the need for further research that uses longitudinal quantitative, as well as qualitative research to investigate how ordinary, everyday life differs for people of different social status, in different kinds of neighbourhood social environments, and in different kinds of housing situations. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).