COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY

Comparative case study

Comparative case study

Population of South Devon

The sources used in this chapter are primarily the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the 1991 Census. Data from the LFS and other social surveys are used to give more up-to-date figures for countries and regions. All local authority data relate to the 1991 Census, as this is the most up to date information available with this level of geographic detail. However, data for countries and regions will not be directly comparable to the local authority level data from the Census. Data from the 1991 Census have been recast to current (1999) boundaries, in line with the rest of the volume. These local authority boundaries will be current in the 2001 Census so the information should be useful for comparison purposes. However this was not fully possible for the marital status and country of birth data for England and Wales. For these two groups of data it was not possible to take into account boundary changes that involved the reallocation of only one enumeration district (ED) from one authority to another. Account was taken of all other boundary changes and so this will have minimal effect on the patterns presented. 

Marital Status

The association between marital status and health, first noted by Farr in the 1850s2 and Durkeim in the 1890s, has also been the subject of more recent study. In 1967, an analysis of suicides by marital status was included in the Registrar General's Statistical Review and showed that the married had much lower mortality from suicide than the unmarried, with the divorced having the highest rates. A number of more recent studies have also shown an association between marriage and health.5 Analysis using the US National Longitudinal Mortality Study showed that the unmarried were found to be at increased risk of death compared to the married, for both men and women. This strong association was found to remain after adjustment for socio-economic factors. Work using the ONS Longitudinal Study for England and Wales has shown married men and women to have lower mortality rates than single, widowed or divorced men and women. Migrants to England and Wales who were unmarried also had higher mortality than migrants who were married.8 Another study that followed men up during the 1980s found that single (never-married) men were at increased risk of cardiovascular mortality, and other causes of mortality excluding cancer, compared to married men. Divorced or separated men were not found to be at increased risk and widowed men were found to be at increased risk of non-cancer non-cardiovascular disease mortality. This was found after controlling for factors such as health and socio-economic status. 

A study using the United States National Longitudinal Mortality Study found that the divorced had a suicide rate twice as high as those who were married, after adjusting for factors such as age, race, education, income and region.10 A further study of cause-specific mortality found unmarried men to be at increased risk of mortality from testicular cancer.11 It is not just risk of adult mortality that marital status is associated with. Young single women are less likely to attend antenatal classes than older married women, which has implications for the future health of their children12 and variation in social support, including marital status, has been shown in one study to account for over 30 ...