Research Type: Work, Health & Social Mobility

It has been reported that the daily commute to work in the UK accounts for around one fifth of all journeys each day (Pooley & Turnbull, 2000). This statistic highlights the importance of understanding the workings of the phenomenon and ensuring that, as a modern society, we are adequately prepared for it.

Over recent decades Northern Ireland’s labour market has been characterised by inequality, largely as a result of its place within a religiously divided society. One manifestation of this division has been a higher average employment rate among the Protestant population relative to the Roman Catholic population. Many explanations were offered for this disparity, the most contentious of which was religious discrimination (see Smith and Chambers, 1991). Concurrent with legislation enacted to address such discrimination, Northern Ireland underwent much economic and social transformation. These events, it has been argued, made a joint contribution to reducing the religion-employment disparity (see Shuttleworth and Osborne, 2004) – but it is not clear whether this remains the case, or whether other inequalities have arisen (or displaced past inequalities). Indeed, it is much less clear whether inequalities within religious groupings (e.g. between Protestant denominations) have developed over time and whether these could be of greater significance than those between the two main communities.

This project aims to examine the relationship between birth weight/pre-term births and educational attainment, with reference to other related variables including geography, family background and socio-economic status to explore whether birth weight is an accurate predictor of educational attainment through a data linkage project between health trust data and the NILS database.

Social mobility refers to how great individuals’ opportunities are for advancement through social and occupational grades or classes. A widely used indicator of the level of fairness in a society is whether or not successive generations are enabled to attain occupations at higher grades than those achieved in previous generations of their family or household.

In NILS project 060 (‘Worked to death..’), Research Team (DOR & MR) examined the mortality associated with numbers of hours spent working for those in full-time employment, as recorded at the 2001 Census of Northern Ireland. A paper reporting the results has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Epidemiology (impact factor=6.98), and it has also stimulated a meta-analysis of 17 international cohorts to confirm the modification of the relationship between long working hours and cardiovascular disease by occupational class.