Poverty and health: exploring the links between financial stress and emotional stress in Australia

The links between poverty and health have been investigated in a number of independent studies, as well as by the Poverty Commission in the 1970s and, more recently, the National Health Strategy. However, much of the poverty research suffers from the lack of detailed information on health status, while the work conducted in the public health sphere has used rather rudimentary poverty measures. The research reported here attempts to overcome these limitations by using unit record data from two national household surveys conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1990. Together, these two data sets contain an enormous amount of detailed information on household incomes and the health status of individuals. Data from the two surveys are combined in a way which allows the links between poverty and health to be explored in greater detail than has hitherto been possible in Australia. Analysis of the integrated data set focuses on the links between poverty and several measures of stress-related poor health. The results from a variety of different methods point to the existence of significant differences between the reported incidence of stress of those whose incomes place them either side of a poverty threshold. The size of the statistical association between poverty and stress is of both numerical and statistical significance, although further work, preferably using longitudinal data, is needed on the important issues of causation.