Health Sciences

Methodologies to assess the relationship between residential histories and the geography of mortality

There are significant variations in the risk of death found between populations living in areas of the UK with different levels of deprivation which have persisted through the twentieth century. While reducing these inequalities is a priority for national government policies to address them have had limited success. This project is based upon the principle that to understand better the relationship between area deprivation and mortality rates it is necessary to understand better the histories of residential migration through which people come to their place of death. The aim of this pilot project is to develop new approaches to analysing migration across the life span which combine methodologies from history, health and geographical research. This project will trace residential histories of people in small neighbourhoods of York, with different levels of deprivation, forwards from birth and backwards from death at the beginning and end of the twentieth century. Data linkage will be used to match names and places in birth, death and marriage registrations, baptism and burial records, electoral registers and other historical and contemporary datasets. Analysis will then assess how patterns of migration are related to individual and area socio-economic status, age and place of birth and death.