Using individual and area level data from NILS and the Northern Ireland Census, I plan to assess the degree to which social resilience can be considered an important factor in long term population health.
The ethnic composition of the UK is changing and diversity is increasing. By 2011, 14% of the population in England and Wales defined themselves as Non-White. However, due to a scarcity of data, information on mortality for ethnic groups, an important population health indicator, is still not routinely collected. Numerous UK health studies found varying health outcomes by ethnic group and research into immigrant mortality also unearthed significant differences between groups.
Cultural transmission, how a group of people within a culture learn and pass on information, is an important mechanism underlying human behaviour, but empirical evidence from real world settings of how behaviours spread is still scarce. Northern Ireland is a unique context to explore these patterns, as two large groups Catholics and Protestants, historically holding different norms e.g. with regards to reproduction, live side by side. Even though Northern Ireland has become more integrated, there are still many areas that are predominantly Catholic or Protestant enabling testing hypotheses about cultural transmission.
Racial-ethnic segregation has been suggested to be a factor affecting health outcomes, but its impacts have not been consistent across different studies (Kramer and Hogue, 2009; Williams and Collins, 2001). Inconsistent results from those studies may be attributable to the fact that the typical approach to measuring segregation fails to account for the fact that racial-ethnic groups may be spatially separated due to socioeconomic factors other than racial-ethnic differences. Particularly, the mechanism and outcomes of the housing market in sorting population spatially have to be accounted for. In addition, relationships between segregation and health have not been evaluated over time.
The project examines religious change in Northern Ireland over time (1991 – 2011).
On the aggregate level, the extent to which the socio-religious fabric across Northern Ireland has changed between 2001 and 2011 is investigated. A large literature on secularization in Europe and the US points towards a trend of religious decline that is predominant in most of Europe (Pollack 2008; Pickel 2009; Crockett and Voas 2006; Bruce 2002). However, due to several factors (its specific political history, the predominantly rural structure of the country) Northern Ireland could be an exceptional case and could thus deviate from the general (Western-) European pattern. Strong associations between religious and national identities have been pointed out in the literature on Northern Ireland (Hayes and McAllister 2009). This project thus also examines to what extent the patterns found for religious identities overlap with the patterns found for national identities.
The aim is to make use of information about residential area choices and the timing of moves to uncover the preferences for housing, segregation and other dynamically-evolving area attributes in Northern Ireland (NI). The 2001 Census indicates that roughly 42% of Catholics and 39% of Protestants live in areas (1 km grid squares) where over 90% of the people are of the same community background as them (Shuttleworth and Lloyd, 2009). Many papers have considered the degree of segregation and what the consequences are but few try to establish what are the causes and dynamics that perpetuate it and what households’ preferences are actually over.
There is now a significant body of evidence that marital dissolution (divorce and separation) is detrimental to health for a significant segment of the population and to their children. Although much has been written of the standard demographic and socio-economic factors influencing risk of divorce, much less is known about the effects of interpersonal differences between the partners. Intercensal births and data accounting for deaths within the household are also included to allow adjustment for known stressors on marriage.
This research aims to gain a better understanding of how cultural mixing influences human behavioural diversity and individual and community well-being; the specific focus will be on fertility outcomes in the context of Protestant and Catholic communities in contemporary Northern Ireland.
There has been a long history of epidemiological analysis looking at how religion influences population health and mortality, for example in the impact of religion on both all-cause and cause-specific mortality. However, analysis has not usually concentrated on differences between current experience, religious affiliation of upbringing, and no reported affiliation. This latter aspect of religiosity is becoming more important given the increasing secularisation of developed societies and the associated rise in numbers of individuals who define themselves as non-religious.
