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Scholars and activists working both within and outside the massive health-related machinery of government and the private sector and within and outside communities of color address the same fundamental questions: Why do health disparities exist? Why have they persisted over such a long time? What can be done to significantly reduce or eliminate them?

Purpose: We review theory and research to suggest how research on sexual and gender minority (SGM) population health could more completely account for social class.

Approach: First, we review theory on social class, gender, and sexuality, especially pertaining to health. Next, we review research on social class among SGM populations. Then, we review 42 studies of SGM population health that accounted for one or more components of social class. Finally, we suggest future directions for investigating social class as a fundamental driver of SGM health.

Findings: Social class and SGM stigma are both theorized as “fundamental causes” of health, yet most studies of SGM health do not rigorously theorize social class. A few studies control socioeconomic characteristics as mediators of SGM health disparities, but that approach obscures class disparities within SGM populations. Only two of 42 studies we reviewed examined SGM population health at the intersections of social class, gender, and sexuality.

Research implications: Researchers interested in SGM population health would benefit from explicitly stating their chosen theory and operationalization of social class. Techniques such as splitting samples by social class and statistical interactions can help illuminate how social class and SGM status intertwine to influence health.

Originality: We synthesize theory and research on social class, sexuality, and gender pertaining to health. In doing so, we hope to help future research more thoroughly account for social class as a factor shaping the lives and health of SGM people.

This paper empirically examines the inequalities related to social class and income using individual self‐reported health status data. Health inequalities are estimated by different indexes using individual standardised and unstandardised health status data. The population was divided into income and social class, respectively. From this two main results are obtatined: inequalities are sensitive to the health status variable and the social position variable employed. It was found that significant health related social class inequalities were insignificant when income was employed as a reference variable.

Notes how the 1980 Black Report on the extent and causes of health inequalities in the UK made little mention of how these issues affect youth or young people. Questions the conclusion of the Black Report that health inequalities are a pervasive feature at all ages. Describes the “West of Scotland Twenty‐07 Study: Health in the Community” being carried out by the MRC Medical Sociology Unit, which tracked around 1,000 people in each of three age cohorts, the youngest of which was aged 15 when first interviewed in 1987. Asks questions about health, family life, life at school, leisure patterns and health‐related behaviours like exercise, diet, smoking and drug use, and about their attitudes and concerns; summarizes some of the results from this study. Concludes that in early youth, around the time of secondary education, there is less evidence of class differences in health than at any other point in the life‐course, including the earlier period of childhood, and that health is more strongly linked to where young people are heading than where they have come from.

Researchers have spent considerable time studying how racial-ethnic minorities experience poorer health than whites [Townsend, P., & Davidson, N. (Eds). (1990). Inequalities in health: The black report. England: Penguin Press; Platt, L. (2006). Assessing the impact of illness, caring and ethnicity on social activity. STICERD Research Paper No. CASE108 London England), and how low socioeconomic status (SES) can negatively influence health status (Lynch, J., & Kaplan, G. (2000). Socioeconomic position. In: L. F. Berkman & I. Kawachi (Eds), Social epidemiology (pp. 13–55). New York: Oxford University Press]. This research investigates the relationship between class and race and perceived health status among patients with chronic conditions. More specifically, we apply the concept of social capital to assess whether the quantity of health information seeking behaviors (HISB) via social networks mediates the relationship between race and health status, and between SES and health status. Regression, t-test and ANOVA analyses of 305 surveys completed at a chronic illness management clinic in a Northwest research hospital reveal three important findings: first, that social class affects perceived health status more strongly than race; second, that frequency and amount of HISB do not play a significant role in perceived health status, regardless of race or SES; and third, that an interaction effect between frequency and amount of HISB suggests that the way that patients seek health information, and the quality of that information, may be more useful indicators of the role of social capital in HISB than our study can provide.

Reports the results of a study into the urban health issues of Muslim minorities, in the city of Aligarh, India, in 1991‐1993. Outlines the conceptual framework and presents the methodology before providing a brief portrait of the Muslim minority status and urbanization. Concludes that basic health information is still lacking. Comments that infectious diseases, malnutrition and occupational diseases are the most common, with women, children and elderly being the most vulnerable.

This chapter offers a broad view of ways organizations create and sustain social class distinction in the workplace and how these outcomes bolster broader perspectives about socioeconomic status and social class. One’s social class generally refers to earnings, education, or occupational status. In more complex terms, power dynamics create a dichotomy between owners of production forces and workers they employ; a social class structure of haves versus have-nots which organizes human relations. Chapter 9 draws from multiple research traditions to examine the wage labor system, combined with trends, myths and fallacies about social class, social identity intersectionalities, and specifically how social class is performed in organizations.

No matter how much people and their societies prefer to think of themselves as unrestricted and egalitarian, it seems that social class – perhaps more rigidly than any other social identity dimension – offers a ready reminder that social spaces and experiences at work, home, and elsewhere are clearly marked by social class. Key concepts explored include classism, class-free society illusions, and blue- and other color collar metaphors which connote power and privilege. To interrogate social identity research on social class in organizations, explored are subthemes of: socioeconomic status (SES) and the wage labor system in organizations; trends, myths, and fallacies about social class in the United States; intersectionalities of social class identity with age, ethnicity, gender, and physical/psychological ability; and “doing social class” at work.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate children's vulnerability to asthma and its relationship with marginalized locations. More specifically, the effects of zip code level social predictors on children's asthma and their conditionality on location in the Texas‐Mexico border region are explored. The border region is perhaps the most marginalized in the USA.

Data for analysis comes from the State of Texas and the US Bureau of the Census. Negative binomial regression models are used to predict asthma hospitalizations using a set of social predictors. Then, interaction effects are used to test if social predictors are conditional on border location.

Within the state of Texas, location in a metropolitan area, location along the US‐Mexico border, percent Hispanic, percent African American and percent Native American are positive and significant predictors of asthma hospitalizations; social class is negative and significant. The effects of proportion of Hispanics who were foreign born, median year of home construction, and percent of homes with inadequate heating are conditional on a zip code's location relative to the US‐Mexico border, with the slopes being steeper in border locations. Findings in general suggest that locational and social factors intersect in marginalized places (i.e. border regions of Texas) to create vulnerability to asthma hospitalizations.

This study is conducted solely in the USA.

As sociologists continue to consider space as a factor in health inequalities, this paper demonstrates the utility of considering space as operating at more than one scale.

Epidemiology is often described as “the basic science of public health” (Savitz, Poole & Miller, 1999; Syme & Yen, 2000). This description suggests both a close association with public health practice, and the separation of “pure” scientific knowledge from its application in the messy social world. Although the attainability of absolute objectivity is rarely claimed, epidemiologists are routinely encouraged to “persist in their efforts to substitute evidence for faith in scientific reasoning” (Stolley, 1985, p. 38) and reminded that “public health decision makers gain little from impassioned scholars who go beyond advancing and explaining the science to promoting a specific public health agenda” (Savitz et al., 1999, p. 1160). Epidemiology produces authoritative data that are transformed into evidence which informs public health. Those data are authoritative because epidemiology is regarded as a neutral scientific enterprise. Because its claims are grounded in science, epidemiological knowledge is deemed to have “a special technical status and hence is not contestable in the same way as are say, religion or ethics” (Lock, 1988, p. 6). Despite the veneer of universality afforded by its scientific pedigree, epidemiology is not a static or monolithic discipline. Epidemiological truth claims are embodied in several shifting paradigms that span the life of the discipline. Public health knowledges and practices, competing claims internal and external to epidemiology, and structural conditions (such as current political economies, material technologies, and institutions) provide important contexts in which certain kinds of epidemiological knowledge are more likely to emerge.

This is a volume about gender, health and medicine broadly defined. It is based on the now widely-held assumption in the sociology of medicine that medicine and health are social constructions and that gender is an embedded part of them (see Lorber, 1997). The essays reveal that embedded with gender in the institution of medicine are race, class, and sexuality. Taken as a whole, the volume offers a critique of exclusively biomedical approaches to personal and public health and calls for more sociological input and qualitative research to help us understand aspects of health and illness. Among the recurrent themes in the seven essays are the medicalization of personal and social problems, the commodification of healthcare, and questions of agency, responsibility and control.