Tag: deprivation

Why is the UK’s Child Mortality Rate so High?

The United Kingdom has the highest child mortality rate in Western Europe except for Malta. The UK’s child mortality rate currently stands t 6.5 per thousand live births.

This has been the case for many years now and a recent research study into the causes has found that deprivation is the key factor which correlates with higher infant mortality rate.

Dr Karen Luyt from the University of Bristol lead the study which found that every extra 10% increase in deprivation, there is a corresponding increase in the child mortality rate.

To put it bluntly* the poorer a child is the more likely they are to die before they reach 18 years of age. (*and maybe crudely as poverty isn’t exactly the same thing as deprivation).

It’s not that being born into deprivation itself directly causes a child to be more likely to die compared to a child born into wealth, it’s the societal and lifestyle factors associated with being born into deprivation.

And the primary factor which causes higher child mortality rates is exposure to smoking.

The programme above features one interview with someone from a deprived background which illustrate how this works – she describes how she started smoking at 14, along with all her friends, and this wasn’t discouraged as her entire family smoked too.

She describes how her friends would pool their lunch money to buy cigarettes and do without lunch and sometimes use the school emergency fund not for lunch but again for cigarettes.

And then when these teenagers become adults they carry on smoking, and when some of them eventually get pregnant, around 6% of them continue smoking into pregnancy, and it’s that which increases the likelihood of child mortality.

(The link between smoking during pregnancy and damaging the foetus is well established).

There have been government intervention programmes to try and help people quit smoking but they are less successful in poorer areas where more people smoke as it’s simply harder to quit when more people around you in your daily life are smoking.

And not to mention cuts to government pubic health funding recently which mean many of these quit smoking programmes have been cut back.

This issue was the investigation of a recent News Night study which you can view on YouTube:

NB – the first half of the video is about the issue of smoking, the second half mainly consists of politicians lying about their commitments to improving public health funding.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This provides yet more evidence of the consequences of inequality in society, and the harmful effects of deprivation in particular, and it’s a useful update to topic of death rates, which have long been declining in rich countries, but this reminds us that even in rich countries like Britain the death rate can be relatively high in deprived areas.

If we look at the agenda of the report it’s also interesting that ‘deprivation’ is the main cause of high child death rates and yet the whole video is about the lifestyle issue of smoking – this might be an example of agenda setting from a Marxist point of view – shifting the emphasis away from the broader issue of inequality to the ‘lifestyle’ factor of smoking.

Finally, it’s a good example of quantitative data analysis – with a research team talking data from the public health database and correlating this with other factors such as the deprivation index. This is is research broadly in line with Positivist tradition.

The relationship between religion and social class

The relationship between social class and religion is not straightforward: the middle classes are, in general, more likely to attend church, but they are also less likely to believe in God and more likely to be atheists and join both world affirming and world rejecting NRMs.

The working classes are less likely to attend church, yet more likely to believe in God than the middle classes. There are also certain denominations and even sects which might appeal specifically to the working classes: such as Methodism, for example.

Church attendance and social class

The ‘middle classes’ have higher rates of church attendance than the ‘working classes’

  • A 2015 YouGov survey of 7000 adults found that 62% of regular church goers were middle class and 38% working class.
  • The same 2015 survey found that twice as many married working class men had never attended church compared to middle class men (17% compared to 9%).
  • Voas and Watt (2014) conducted research on behalf of the Church of England and made three observations not directly about social class, but relevant to it. Firstly, church attendance is higher in rural areas compared to urban areas. Secondly, church attendance is higher in the South of England compared to the North. Thirdly, they noted growth in church attendance in areas which had high performing church primary and secondary schools. All of these indicators suggest higher church attendance in middle class compared to working class areas.
  • Ashworth and Farthing (2007) found that, for both sexes, those in middle class jobs had above average levels of church attendance. Conversely, those in skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled working class jobs had below average church attendance. Welfare recipients had the lowest levels of church attendance.

Religious belief and social class

  • A 2016 YouGov Survey revealed that 48% of those in social grades ABC1 described themselves as ‘Atheist’ compared to 42% of those in social grades C2ED.

  • A 2013 review of >60 research studies on the relationship between IQ and religiosity found that people with higher IQs are more likely to be atheists. (High IQs are correlated with higher levels of education and higher social class).
  • Lawes (2009) found that ‘lifelong theists’ disproportionately come from unskilled and semi-skilled manual backgrounds, and were less likely to have academic qualifications. Conversely, lifelong atheists disproportionately come from higher professional and managerial backgrounds, and are more likely to have experienced higher education.

NB – It’s worth noting how this contradicts what’s above in terms of church attendance

Social class, religion and deprivation 

There is some evidence that those suffering deprivation (the lower social classes) are more likely to turn to religion…..

  • Churches in deprived inner city areas tend to have higher rates of attendance.
  • Methodist, Pentacostal and Baptist denominations  tend to be more working class.
  • Catholic Churches are more likely to attract Irish, Polish and African immigrants who have typically experienced higher levels of deprivation.

New Religious Movements and social class

As a general rule, the middle classes are more attracted to both World Affirming NRMs (and the New Age Movement), and World Rejecting NRMs, at least according to Eileen Barker’s classic study of ‘The Moonies’.

Problems with identifying the relationship between religion and social class

  1. Andrew Mckinnon notes that there has been a ‘dearth’ of research on the relationship between religion and social class, meaning there is something of a data gap.
  2. Because of the above, we are often stuck with relying on indicators which might not actually measure social class.
  3. Even if the data suggests that church attendance and belief are higher among the middle classes, this doesn’t necessarily mean the middle classes are actually more religious. They may just be attending church to keep up appearances or to get their children into the local church school (which tend to have high academic performance); or they  may feel under more social pressure to state they are religious than the working classes

Sources: 

Chapman et al, as well as the good ole’ t’internet.

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