Talk:Whitehall Study

Copy edit

Completed a stem-to-stern copyedit. Reordered some introductory text to avoid duplication and make the text flow better. Some rephrasing to reduce medical jargon and make the article more generally accessible in keeping with the Manual of Style for medicine-related articles. Updated journal references to use the cite journal template. Moved bare links to references where possible; removed some links that are now broken, replacing them where possible. Macwhiz (talk) 23:29, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Fundamental Assumptions

This article is very interesting, but the following quotation startled me. “Research continues to explore the pathways and mechanisms through which social position influences health.” This sentence could be rewritten to say: “Research continues to explore the pathways and mechanisms through which health influences social position.” Throughout this article, there is a clear assumption about the direction of causality, which is made explicit in the sentence immediately following the sentence quoted above. That sentence states: “The research group aims to build a causal model leading from social position through psychosocial and behavioural pathways to pathophysiological changes, sub-clinical markers of disease, functional change, and clinical disease.” This attribution of environmental causality seems to me, to be completely arbitrary. Why should a scientist not consider that the unfortunate negative statistics associated with lower status in a social hierarchy are a result of better or worse inherited differences in general health, especially when variables like physical height and obesity are so clearly implicated. I would like to see discussion of this issue, and I am leaving this note here to provoke such discussion. I am considering contacting the research group. Interested parties are welcome to contact me. Janice Vian, Ph.D. (talk) 05:18, 24 December 2025 (UTC)