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Objective: The objective of this paper was to describe results of a public health-administered, provincial dental survey of children aged 4-6 years old in British Columbia, and assess the changes in rates of dental caries geographically and by neighbourhood socio-economic status between baseline (2006/07) and follow-up data collection (2009/10)., Method: The study design involved two retrospective cohorts of kindergarten children who received a public health-administered dental assessment in the years 2006/07 and 2009/10. Neighbourhood socio-economic status was measured by an index created from Canadian Census and Tax Filer data sets. The dental outcomes included previous decay experience, untreated visible decay, and urgent treatment needs., Results: The analysis comprised dental outcomes for 35,602 kindergarten children in 2006/07 and 35,215 children in 2009/10. There was a modest decrease in dental decay rates between surveys, with rates of decay experience - previous and untreated - of 38.9% and 36.7% respectively. However, there were disparities, with almost 50% of children with dental decay in the most socio-economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and approximately 30% with dental decay in the least disadvantaged areas., Conclusion: The kindergarten dental survey had extensive coverage, was at the population level, and enabled analysis of change in early childhood dental decay rates over time and by geography. Although overall rates improved, dental health inequalities persisted in both survey years at both regional and neighbourhood levels.

Objective: The Vancouver Area Neighbourhood Deprivation Index (VANDIX) is a census-based measure of socio-economic status (SES). It was designed to serve as an accessible and representative proxy marker of population health status without requiring more extensive health data. This paper describes the structure and previous applications of the VANDIX for measuring relative variations in health outcomes in British Columbia, Canada., Methods: The VANDIX was constructed from a 2005 survey of provincial medical health officers asking them to comment on the best census markers of health status in British Columbia. The VANDIX is based on the weighted summation of seven socio-economic variables from the census, including in order of weighted importance: proportion without high school completion; proportion without university completion; unemployment rate; proportion of lone-parent families; average income; proportion of home owners; and employment ratio., Results: The VANDIX has been applied in numerous research and policy settings across the province against several distributions of health status, including self-rated health, injury and access to health care services. In each assessment, the VANDIX has shown that socio-economic inequities parallel health inequities., Conclusion: SES is one of the most influential factors that shape population patterns of health outcomes. Census-based indicators of SES such as the VANDIX can serve as easily accessible and representative markers of population health status, and have application for policy, research and public health promotion.

This paper presents research findings from an ethnographic study carried out with 24 low-income youths (ages 14-16) living on the economic fringes of urban inner-city Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Our primary aims are: to expose the stratified subcultural articulations of citizenship as they are expressed, through language and symbol, by the young people within our study; and to demonstrate how critiques of (neo-)liberalism in political thought, when combined with a cultural sociology of youth, might alter our subcultural reading of young people's conceptions of citizenship under the dynamics of radical social change. Our ultimate goal is to develop a more nuanced sociological examination of the ways in which young people deploy and utilize the language of citizenship as part of their own cultural struggles, exacerbated in times of state retrenchment, to classify themselves and others as one method of achieving visibility and legitimacy in urban concentrations of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]