Housing and health inequalities: Review and prospects for research

To date, relatively little research has systematically investigated relationships and pathways between housing, socio-economic status, and health status. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that one of the most important research needs in health inequalities scholarship is to better elucidate those pathways by which differences in socio-economic status manifest in everyday life, and produce, at the aggregate level, the systematic social gradient in health observed in all industrialised countries of the world. Existing 'population health' research on health inequalities provides evidence of the influence of four key factors upon health: social support, workplace organisation, income inequalities, and life course factors. This material is reviewed in the first section of the paper. The second section reviews the existing literature on housing and health, and finds little work that explicitly investigates housing as a factor in the social production of health inequalities. By extension and analogy, the final section shows, each of the four emphases in health inequalities can be translated into a fruitful, substantive research issue for housing and health research.