In our data, housing tenure was more strongly associated with smoking than educational attainment, social class or car ownership.
After adjusting for these confounding variables smoking was not associated with the type of diabetes, educational attainment, social class or car ownership.
Researchers have used occupational role [ 19], levels of educational attainment [ 12], ad hoc combinations of occupation, home and car ownership [ 20], refined indices such as that of Carstairs [ 21] or of Townsend [ 1], and so-called 'geodemographic' markers [ 15].
This measure allocates a social disadvantage index to each postal area in Australia using census-derived variables including income, educational attainment, levels of employment and the number of households with a car [ 33].
Not all indicators of disadvantage were important: uptake was related to car availability and housing tenure but not to educational attainment or occupational social class (with the exception of those who never worked and the long-term unemployed).
There are "trip targets" – sales attainments that earn company-funded skiing or Mediterranean holidays; and "car targets" – first a Mini, then a BMW, then a Mercedes.
While a adolescent may not know their parent's educational attainment, they are very likely to know whether their family owns a car[ 10].
These values were used to derive an Index of Relative Socioeconomic Advantage/Disadvantage (IRSAD), which accounts for high and low income, educational attainment, type of occupation, and other measures of wealth (such as owning a car, or number of bedrooms in a dwelling) and then divided into quintiles.
Uptake of screening was strongly linked to both car availability and housing tenure in the fully adjusted model, but not to educational attainment or occupational social class (NSSEC).
