Welcome
We manage the Government's investment in health research. Our vision is to improve the health and quality of life of all New Zealanders.
Funding Opportunities
The HRC allocates funding through an annual funding round for researcher initiated projects, Requests for Proposals, and a range of career development awards.
About Us
We invest in a broad range of research on issues important to New Zealand, and support the development of health research careers. Our mission is 'benefiting New Zealand through health research'.
News and Publications
We produce a wide range of publications and documents, which provide information about funding opportunities, research outcomes and HRC-related news.
Ethics and Regulatory
We help ensure all research involving human participants is based on good science, meets ethical standards and complies with best practice.
Contact Us
If you have any questions about the HRC or would like to know more about how our funding process works, please drop us a line.
Gene Technology Advisory Committee
Professor Peter Davis
2014 Funding Round – Project
Professor
Peter
Davis
The University of Auckland
Life-course predictors of mortality inequalities
$1,091,258
36 months
Lay summary
Life-course socio-economic influences on mortality have different implications for intervention but have not been established in the NewZealand context. We will analyse mortality records linked with the Historic longitudinal census dataset (linked records across the 1981-2006 Censuses) to fulfil four research aims:
- To test which life-course hypotheses best explain associations between socio-economic status and mortality: accumulation, sensitive period, social mobility, or instability?
- To test whether social and cultural capital protects against socio-economic risk.
- To assess ethnic disparities in mortality and test whether these are explained by the greater experiences of long-term harsh and unstable environments among some ethnic groups (e.g., Māori, Pacific).
- To test life-course hypotheses among siblings discordant on socio-economic risk, and among siblings discordant for social and cultural capital (thus controlling for family background factors).
This research will be both methodologically innovative (e.g., discordant sib-pair analyses), and important for the understanding of ethnic inequalities in New Zealand.
Print