Class and health: comparing Britain and Sweden.

The questions addressed in this article are two, namely are class differences in health apparent in Sweden in the same manner as was shown for Britain in the Black Report? and is it possible to learn anything new about inequality patterns in different stages of life from analyses of self-reported morbidity data? By analysing data on long-standing illness by the means of logistic regression, it is shown that the risk of falling ill is distributed in very similar ways in the two countries, although the dispersion of these risk factors seems to be greater in Britain. In an analysis of acute sickness this result is not obtained, which is assumed to be an effect of differences in answering patterns. For Sweden, it is shown that social classes do not differ much in terms of health among the young. Instead, inequalities in health seem to be established at first in middle age.