Farm and health relationships

Gagnon, Alain & Nora Bohnert. (2012). "Early life socioeconomic conditions in rural areas and old-age mortality in twentieth-century Quebec." Social Science & Medicine 75: 1497-1504.

The article "Early life socioeconomic conditions in rural areas and old-age mortality in twentieth-century Quebec" by Alain Gagnon and Nora Bohnert is an analysis of mortality patterns amongst farmers in rural Quebec. Residing in a rural area was shown to convey substantial advantages to both males and females after age fifty, although females in both urban and rural settings had longer life expectances than their male counterparts (Gagnon & Bohnert 2012: 1499). Socioeconomic status has also been shown to be a strong predictor of mortality, as was the case with the farmers in the study.

Perhaps the most interesting findings revolved around the linkage between mortality and the childhood experiences of specific groups. Rural males raised on a farm and on a farm owned by their father (presumably a wealthier and more autonomous father) had lower mortality after age fifty then other rural men. Residing on larger farms and higher socioeconomic status as children were also predictors of lower mortality rates among men. Interestingly enough, these findings did not hold true for women. There was no connection between reduced mortality regarding the wealth of the father, but having a literate father was a factor that contributed to longevity.

According to the study's designers, it offered a considerable improvement upon previous studies in terms of how it was crafted. Rather than beginning with death records, the study was able to make use of "a random sample of individuals surveyed in the 1901 Canadian Census in childhood to their age at death using vital statistics registers" (Gagnon & Bohnert 2012: 1498). This reduced the risk of selection bias "due to missing death records, which could represent a distinct advantage over typical studies that rely on retrospective surveying of adult respondents" (Gagnon & Bohnert 2012: 1498). The stratified random sample consisted of five percent of the population of the Canadian census and was divided into different categories, representing membership in urban and rural groupings; ownership of the father of the land, wealth, literacy, and gender. From the five percent sample, "the province of Quebec was further sampled at 85% percent of the CFP sample, selecting only households that contained at least one child under the age of fifteen" (Gagnon & Bohnert 2012: 1498).

The sample population was further culled by only selecting individuals born in Quebec between the years 1887 and 1901 and of French ethnicity and Roman Catholic status. This was designed to ensure that other factors would not influence mortality that pertained to race, ethnicity and immigration status: socioeconomic status and rural status was the focus of the study. The authors noted that they were able to control for 'shared frailty' among brothers: some families had unusually high death rates at relatively early ages, and controlling for these unusual genetic patterns further improved the accuracy of the findings (Gagnon & Bohnert 2012: 1502).