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Department of Sociology

 
PRIVMORT Launches New Website

Research project PRIVMORT (Privatisation and Mortality in Eastern Europe) launches its new website today...

Research project PRIVMORT (Privatisation and Mortality in Eastern Europe) launches its new website today, which is supported by a fast-paced video, highlighting the key features on the website.

The PRIVMORT project was funded in 2013 by the European Research Council and conducted large-sample surveys in Russia, Belarus and Hungary (in total 63,073 interviews) to examine the impact of privatisation on health in post-communist states. Project funding is set to continue until later this year.

Over 7 million excess premature deaths were experienced in post-communist countries in the early 1990’s, with obvious peaks in this type of death over subsequent major economic downturns. Previous research has attributed proximal causes of these deaths to factors including alcohol and social and psychological stress, but the more distant factors for these fluctuations in death toll are unclear. The PRIVMORT project was designed to link micro- and macro- level data to determine the hierarchy of causes of mortality from the distal (e.g. privatization) to the proximal (e.g. alcohol) in the three aforementioned countries.

The main research objectives of the project were:

  1.  To conduct an in-depth investigation into the post-communist mortality crisis using multi-level data.
  2. To provide meso- and micro-data to test the privatization-mortality hypothesis;
  3. To understand whether post-communist mortality in general and any potential privatisation-induced mortality, in particular, are influenced by social factors such as class, occupational position, education, gender and community level factors; and
  4. To examine the effect of these social variables on health outcomes in the post-communist states.

The initial outputs of the PRIVMORT dataset provide evidence indicate that the rapid pace of privatisation in post-Soviet Russia was a significant factor in increasing working-age male mortality. More results are yet to be published- keep checking back on the website for further information!

The website was developed by Timur Alexandrov, PhD researcher of the Department of Sociology.