Socio-economic status and physical health outcomes : the need for change in theoretical formulations : thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

The Black Report (Department of Health and Social Security, 1980) , which was a seminal publication in the field of health inequality, proposed several possible theoretical explanations for the phenomenon of socio-economic health inequality. To date the models proposed in the Black Report have yet to be improved on, or developed greatly. While research in the field of socio-economic health inequality has been substantial, the state of theoretical formulation which attempts to explain such inequality has remained static. The phenomenon of socio- economic health inequality will be established by producing evidence for how socio-economic status impacts on health from many countries, but especially from the United Kingdom, North America, Australasia, and Europe. Potential pathways for socio-economic status to impact on health outcomes will be assessed, and an illustration of potential pathways will be provided with an application. The theoretical approaches of the Black Report, along with a more recent conceptualisation, will be discussed. The potential contribution of psychological factors to socio-economic health inequality will be considered following the establishment of the relationship, proposal of potential pathways, and theoretical formulation discussions to demonstrate how such factors are involved in socio-economic health inequality. From these first four sections it can be deduced that current theoretical formulations to explain socio-economic health inequality are deficient. To contend with this deficiency it is proposed that a more holistic approach, which includes psychological factors, is necessary. Future research should seek to empirically validate links within the confines of a more holistic framework if our understanding of the relation between socio-economic status and physical health outcomes is to improve

Common Causes and The Direction of Causation

Is the common cause principle merely one of a set of useful heuristics for discovering causal relations, or is it rather a piece of heavy duty metaphysics, capable of grounding the direction of causation itself? Since the principle was introduced in Reichenbach’s groundbreaking work The Direction of Time (1956), there have been a series of attempts to pursue the latter program—to take the probabilistic relationships constitutive of the principle of the common cause and use them to ground the direction of causation. These attempts have not all explicitly appealed to the principle as originally formulated; it has also appeared in the guise of independence conditions, counterfactual overdetermination, and, in the causal modelling literature, as the causal markov condition. In this paper, I identify a set of difficulties for grounding the asymmetry of causation on the principle and its descendents. The first difficulty, concerning what I call the vertical placement of causation, consists of a tension between considerations that drive towards the macroscopic scale, and considerations that drive towards the microscopic scale—the worry is that these considerations cannot both be comfortably accommodated. The second difficulty consists of a novel potential counterexample to the principle based on the familiar Einstein Podolsky Rosen (EPR) cases in quantum mechanics

Capturing Social Embeddedness: a constructivist approach

A constructivist approach is applied to characterising social embeddedness and to the design of a simulation of social agents which displays the social embedding of agents. Social embeddedness is defined as the extent to which modelling the behaviour of an agent requires the inclusion of the society of agents as a whole. Possible effects of social embedding and ways to check for it are discussed briefly. A model of co-developing agents is exhibited, which is an extension of Brian Arthur's `El Farol Bar' model, but extended to include learning based upon a GP algorithm and the introduction of communication. Some indicators of social embedding are analysed and some possible causes of social embedding are discussed