Health Disparities in Contemporary Korean Society

Sou Hyun Jang is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Sungkyunkwan University.Joong-Hwan Oh is professor of sociology at Hunter College of The City University of New York (CUNY).

Editors Jang and Oh, both American-trained sociologists, bring together 15 articles that originally appeared in English in a number of journals published in Korea—seven are from Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. With just a couple of exceptions, the contributing authors come from institutions of higher education or government institutes in Korea. Aimed at readers outside Korea who are interested in health disparities, the essays in this collection explore access to health care as well as the health conditions of populations such as shift workers, night workers, on-call workers, the elderly, female marriage immigrants, and minority youth. Each chapter's careful account of the data bases and methods of analysis used may allow experts on health and public policy to integrate information on Korea into their understandings of health disparities. Recommended.

• IntroductionPart I: Disparities in Health and Healthcare UtilizationSection 1: Self-Rated Health Chapter 1: Association between Employment Status and Self-Rated Health: Korean Working Conditions SurveyKimin Kwon, Jae Bum Park, Kyung-Jong Lee, and Yoon-Sik ChoChapter 2: Social Capital and its Association with Health and Well-Being: An Individual-Level Analysis in Seoul, South KoreaSehee Han, Heaseung Kim, and Hee-Sun LeeSection 2: Health Insurance & Healthcare UtilizationChapter 3: Paying Out-of-Pocket for Health Care in Korea: Changes in Catastrophic and Poverty Impact over a Decade of 1996-2005TaeJin LeeChapter 4: Multilevel Analysis of Health Care Service Utilization among Medical Aid Beneficiaries in KoreaYang Heui Ahn, Ok Kyung Ham, Soo Hyun Kim, and Chang Gi ParkPart II: Health Disparities among Different Population GroupsSection 3: Employee Health Chapter 5: The Association between Long Working Hours and Self-Rated Health Jun-Taek Song, Goeun Lee, Jongho