CHILDHOOD DISABITY AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC DISADVANTAGE: THE EVIDENCE
Dr Clare Blackburn, Dr Janet Read and Professor Nick Spencer
The Children’s Commissioner for England, Maggie
Atkinson, has recently drawn attention to disabled
children’s experiences of living in low income
families, using evidence from a qualitative research
project carried by the University of Central
Lancashire. In view of the subsequent debate on the
quality of the evidence on the association of poor
material conditions and childhood disability, we are
sending you a summary of some recent research
undertaken at the University of Warwick in the hope
that it may be useful to you.
What have we been researching?
For a number of years we have been looking at the
association between childhood disability and poor
socio-economic circumstances, using data from large
national datasets. We established that children in
the UK who would be defined as disabled by the
Equality Act 2010 were more likely than their nondisabled peers to live with low-income, deprivation,
debt and poor housing. This was particularly the case
for disabled children from black/minority
ethnic/mixed parentage groups and lone-parent
households. The proportion of disabled children
living in lone-parent households ((34%) was
significantly greater than that for non-disabled
children(26%).We also found that almost half
disabled children compared with about a fifth of
non-disabled children, lived with a parent who was
also disabled.
If you want to look at this work in more detail see:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2431/10/21/
These cross-sectional studies give us a snapshot of
the circumstances of the population of disabled
children and their families at any one time and
indicate crucial things that shape their life chances.
They have implications for policy and practice and
offer evidence for the need to address the
conditions of material hardship faced by so many
disabled children and their families in the here and
now. They give us information about the groups
within that population who are the most vulnerable
to material hardship.
A review of the world wide evidence
In our latest research, we undertook the first
systematic review of the evidence in all high income
countries for the link between socio-economic
deprivation and child disability. We reviewed 4680
titles and abstracts and 692 full text articles and
reports and consulted with experts worldwide. We
identified 140 population studies to include in our
systematic review. Our results show that in high
income countries, a high majority of studies indicate
a statistically significant relationship of childhood
disability with socio-economic disadvantage.
For children in low socio-economic households, the
odds of being reported to have a disabling chronic
condition were 70% greater than for those in better
off households.
Which comes first? Poor circumstances or child
disability?
Very few studies have used longitudinal datasets to
examine whether exposure to social disadvantage in
early childhood increases the risk of developing
chronic conditions in later childhood. Our latest
study looked at this and found exposure to socioeconomic disadvantage in early childhood to be a
predisposing factor for the onset of disabling
conditions in later childhood. For children in the
most socio-economically disadvantaged households
the odds of developing such conditions were twice
those for children in the least disadvantaged
households.
If you want to look at this work in more detail see:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2431/13/101
If you want to see a presentation where we talk
about all this work in more detail see:
http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/newsandevents/events2.p
hp?id=582
Our findings indicate that disabled children are
likely to be poorer than their non-disabled peers.
They also show that experiencing socio-economic
disadvantage in early childhood increases the
likelihood of a child becoming disabled.
If you would like to find out more about this work, please
contact C.M.Blackburn@Warwick.ac.uk
Dr Clare Blackburn, Division of Mental Health and Wellbeing
Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL, Tel: 02476 524132