Syllabus/achievement requirements

@ material available online

About 30 pages of literature can be added to the reading list during the course if the teachers find something that is particularly suitable.

Introduction, including the life table, other measures of health and mortality, and the big picture of mortality determinants/risk factors.

@ Ezzati, M., & Riboli, E. Behavioral and dietary risk factors for noncommunicable diseases, 2013. New England Journal of Medicine, 369(10), 954-964.

@ Helweg-Larsen, K. The Danish register of causes of death, 2011. Scandinavian journal of public health, 39(7_suppl), 26-29. 

@ Lecture notes on construction of a life table and related issues

Results from Global Burden of Disease

@ Vos & Murray (2015). Measuring the health of populations: the Global Burden of Disease study method. Chp 2 (p 634-644) in Detels et al. (eds.) Oxford textbook of Global Public Health. Oxford University Press. 

@ Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Norway: State of the Nation’s Health: Findings from the Global Burden of Disease. Seattle, WA: IHME, 2016.for

Sex differences in mortality

@ Oksuzyan, A., Juel, K., Vaupel, J. W., & Christensen, K. Men: good health and high mortality. Sex differences in health and aging, 2008. Aging clinical and experimental research, 20(2), 91.

Differences in mortality between some rich countries

@ Shkolnikov et al. Components and possible determinants of the decrease in Russian mortality in 2004-2010, 2013. Demographic Research 28: 917-950

@ Woolf, S. H., & Aron, L. Y. The US health disadvantage relative to other high-income countries: findings from a National Research Council/Institute of Medicine report, 2013. Jama, 309(8), 771-772.

@ Ikeda, N., Saito, E., Kondo, N., Inoue, M., Ikeda, S., Satoh, T., ... & Noda, M. What has made the population of Japan healthy?, 2011. The Lancet, 378(9796), 1094-1105.

Introduction to event history analysis

@ See lecture notes

The importance of education for mortality (including the importance for healthy life expectancy, the importance of the education of family members and others in the community, parents’ socioeconomic resources: the long arm of childhood adversity, how to try to identify a causal effect by means of siblings/twins/reforms, changes over time, variations in healthy life expectancy)

@ Elo, I. T. Social class differentials in health and mortality: Patterns and explanations in comparative perspective, 2009. Annual Review of Sociology  553-572.

@ Hayward, M. D., Hummer, R.A., and Sasson, I. Trends and group differences in the association between educational attainment and US adult mortality: Implications for understanding education's causal influence, 2015. Social Science & Medicine 127: 8-18.

@ Non-technical parts of: Clark, D., and Royer, H. The effect of education on adult mortality and health: Evidence from Britain, 2013. The American Economic Review 103: 2087-2120.

@ Clouston et al. A social history of disease: contextualizing the rise and fall of social inequalities in cause-specific mortality, 2016. Demography 53: 1631-1656.

@ De Neve, J. W., & Kawachi, I. Spillovers between siblings and from offspring to parents are understudied: A review and future directions for research, 2017. Social Science & Medicine, 183, 56-61.

@ M?ki, N., Martikainen, P., Eikemo, T., Menvielle, G., Lundberg, O., ?stergren, O., ... & Mackenbach, J. P. Educational differences in disability-free life expectancy: a comparative study of long-standing activity limitation in eight European countries, 2013. Social science & medicine, 94, 1-8.

@ Montez, J. K., & Hayward, M. D. Cumulative childhood adversity, educational attainment, and active life expectancy among US adults, 2014. Demography, 51(2), 413-435.

The importance of income for mortality  (individual income, income in the community, procyclical mortality, income relative to others, psychosocial vs materialist explanations, social capital/cohesion, income inequality, occupation)

@ Tarkiainen, L., Martikainen, P., Laaksonen, M., & Valkonen, T. Trends in life expectancy by income from 1988 to 2007: decomposition by age and cause of death, 2011. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, jech-2010.

@ B?vre K and ? Kravdal. Mortality effects of earlier income variation, 2014. Population Studies 68: 81-94 (May decide to leave out later)

@ Murayama, H., Fujiwara, Y., & Kawachi, I. Social capital and health: a review of prospective multilevel studies, 2012. Journal of Epidemiology, 22(3), 179-187.

@ Kravdal, ?. Does income inequality really influence individual mortality? Evidence from a ‘fixed-effects analysis’ where constant unobserved municipality characteristics are controlled, 2008. Demographic Research18: 205-232.

@ Pickett, K. E., & Wilkinson, R. G. Income inequality and health: a causal review, 2015. Social Science & Medicine, 128, 316-326.

@ Kondo N. Kondo, G. Sembajwe, I. Kawachi, R.M. van Dam, S.V. Subramanian, Z. Yamagatal Income inequality, mortality, and self rated health: meta-analysis of multilevel studies, 2009. BMJ, 339, p. b4471

@ Adjaye-Gbewonyo, K., & Kawachi, I. Use of the Yitzhaki Index as a test of relative deprivation for health outcomes: a review of recent literature, 2012. Social science & medicine, 75(1), 129-137.

Other social differences: racial differences, differences between immigrant groups

@ See lecture notes

Brief description of the development of fertility and family behaviour

@ See lecture notes

The importance of marital status for mortality (including determinants of marital status/cohabitation, combination with education)

@ Shor, E., Roelfs, D. J., Bugyi, P., and Schwartz, J. E. Meta-analysis of marital dissolution and mortality: Reevaluating the intersection of gender and age, 2012. Social Science & Medicine 75: 46-59.

@ Boyle, P. J., Feng, Z., and Raab, G. M. Does widowhood increase mortality risk? Testing for selection effects by comparing causes of spousal death, 2011. Epidemiology 22: 1-5.

@ Kravdal, ?. Large and Growing Social Inequality in Mortality in Norway: The Combined Importance of Marital Status and Own and Spouse’s Education, 2017. Forthcoming in Population and Development Review.

@ Keenan, K., Ploubidis, G. B., Silverwood, R. J., & Grundy, E. Life-course partnership history and midlife health behaviours in a population-based birth cohort, 2017. J Epidemiol Community Health, 71(3), 232-238. (May decide to leave out later.)

The importance of fertility for mortality (including determinants of fertility)

@ Kravdal, ?., E. Grundy. T. Lyngstad, and K.Aa. Wiik. Family life history and late mid-life mortality in Norway, 2012. Population and Development Review 38: 237-257.

@ Grundy E and ? Kravdal. Fertility history and cause-specific mortality: a register-based analysis of complete cohorts of Norwegian women and men, 2010. Social Science & Medicine  70: 1847-1857.  (May decide to leave out later)

Regional differences in morality: How much is explained by sociodemographic differences? What are the reasons for the remaining regional variation?

@ Kravdal, ?., K. Alv?r, K. B?vre, J.M. Kinge, J.R.Meisfjord, ?.A. Steingrímsdóttir, B.H. Strand How much of the variation in mortality across Norwegian municipalities is explained by the socio-demographic characteristics of the population?, 2015. Health & Place 33: 148-158

Consequences of fertility (number/age of siblings, parents’ age) and family situation (disruption, re-partnership) for children (including  separating effects of divorce from that of the underlying conflict, education and other socioeconomic factors as causally intermediate variables, sibling models)

@ Barclay and Kolk Birth order and mortality. A population-based cohort study, 2015. Demography 52: 613-639.

@ Barclay and Myrskyla. Advanced maternal age and offspring outcomes: reproductive aging and counterbalancing period trends, 2016. Population and Development Review 42: 69-94

@ Kravdal and Grundy. Age at parental divorce and midlife depression, 2018. Submitted to journal.

Health interventions (general motive, social profile, evaluation by means of RCT or other methods)

@ HM Government. Healthy lives, healthy people: Our strategy for public health in England, 2010 (pdf).

@ Bere, E,B., Veier?d, M.B., & Klepp, K.-I., The Norwegian School Fruit Programme: evaluating paid vs. no-cost subscription, 2005. Preventive Medicine 41: 463-470.

Ageing

@ United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2015). World Population Ageing 2015 (ST/ESA/SER.A/390) (pdf)

Development of mortality (life expectancy) and number of years in good health in the future. Rectangularization

@ Oeppen, J., & Vaupel, J. W. Broken limits to life expectancy, 2002. Science, 296(5570), 1029-1031.

Published Nov. 23, 2017 9:00 AM - Last modified May 19, 2022 11:15 AM