Objectives: To determine the independent associations of labour force status and socioeconomic position with death by suicide. Design: Cohort study assembled by anonymous and probabilistic record linkage of census and mortality records. Participants: 2.04 million respondents to the New Zealand 1991 census aged 18-64 years. Main outcome measure: Suicide in the three years after census night. Results: The age adjusted odds ratios (95% confidence intervals) of death by suicide among 25 to 64 year olds who were unemployed compared with employed were 2.46 (1.10 to 5.49) for women and 2.63 (1.87 to 3.70) for men. Similarly increased odds ratios were observed for the non-active labour force compared with the employed. Strong age only adjusted associations of suicide death with the socioeconomic factors of education (men only), car access, and household income were observed. Compared with those who were married on census night, the non-married had odds ratios of suicide of 1.81 (1.22 to 2.69) for women and 2.08 (1.66 to 2.61) for men. In a multivariable model the association of socioeconomic factors with suicide reduced to the null. However, marital status and labour force status remained strong predictors of suicide death. Unemployment was also strongly associated with suicide death among 18-24 year old men. Sensitivity analyses suggested that confounding by mental illness might explain about half, but not all, of the association between unemployment and suicide. Conclusions: Being unemployed was associated with a twofold to threefold increased relative risk of death by suicide, compared with being employed. About half of this association might be attributable to confounding by mental illness. : unemployment may confer vulnerability by increasing the impact of stressful life events; it may indirectly cause suicide by increasing the risk of factors that precipitate suicide (for example, mental illness, financial difficulties); or it may be a non-causal association because of confounding or selection by factors that predict both unemployment status and suicide risk.Studies controlling for confounding by social factors find an approximately twofold excess suicide risk among the unemployed, 4 5 but the possibility remains of health selection or residual confounding. Health selection is where poor health precedes and predicts both unemployment and death causing a spurious association of unemployment with suicide. Data from the British general household survey on the prevalence of limiting longstanding illness by labour force status were consistent with health selection into the non-active labour force (that is, excluding both the employed and unemployed), but not into the unemployed category (that is, actively seeking and available for work). 6 Another test of health selection is that a weaker association of unemployment with poor health would be expected in times of high background unemployment rates, as a greater proportion of "ordinary" people (that is, not just people with poor health or other characteristics conferring...

ACTRN12609000779279.

No abstract

Our results are consistent with a causal association between changing economic inequalities and changing health inequalities between ethnic groups. However, causality cannot be established from a historical analysis alone. Three lessons nevertheless emerge from the New Zealand experience: the lag between changes in ethnic social inequality and ethnic health inequality may be short (<5 years); both changes in the distribution of the social determinants of health and an appropriate health system response may be required to address ethnic health inequalities; and timely monitoring of ethnic health inequalities, based on high-quality ethnicity data, may help to sustain political commitment to pro-equity health and social policies.

There does not appear to be notable variation in relative risk terms of socioeconomic differences in child mortality by age or cause of death. Any association of one-parent families with child mortality is due to associated low socioeconomic position.