Many studies in developed countries around the world have reported variations in cancer survival associated with socioeconomic status. Understanding the causes of survival disparities is of continued interest to inform interventions targeting disparities, and monitoring survival trends over time to evaluate the effectiveness of such interventions. Cancer survival is a useful measure in evaluating cancer control efforts, giving a quantifiable measure of the effectiveness of diagnostic and treatment services, and the management of cancer care. Ecologic analyses are widely used for evaluating the effectiveness of a population intervention. Increased socioeconomic variability within geographic area-units makes it difficult to isolate the discrete effect of socioeconomic status on cancer survival, particularly when using few, or large, geographic units. Despite recent research interest in socioeconomic disparities in cancer outcomes, NSW cancer-registry data has not been used to track temporal trends in survival disparities for many years. Furthermore, no study in NSW has investigated how the geographic area-level at which SES is measured impacts the survival disparities detected. This thesis analyses trends in socioeconomic survival disparities over time for ten major cancers in New South Wales, demonstrating that recent health and social policies in NSW have accompanied an increase in cancer survival overall, but they have not been associated with a reduction in socioeconomic inequalities. This thesis also compares two different area-units for measuring socioeconomic disparities in cancer survival in NSW, showing that while patient SES classification differed between area-units, the impact on cancer survival disparities of SES misclassification when using the larger area-unit was relatively small and inconsistent. Overall, this thesis emphasizes the importance of assessing progress toward eliminating cancer survival inequalities and has important implications for predicting and planning for the future needs of cancer care services in NSW. This thesis also contributes to the field of epidemiology by improving our understanding of the impact of using area-based measures of differing geographical precision when investigating socioeconomic inequalities in health outcomes
