Georgia Chatzi
Life course Socioeconomic Position effects on Inflammatory Biomarkers in older adults: compensating for Missing data
PhD summary
Low individual and contextual socioeconomic position is associated with cardiovascular disease. Greater cumulative life-course exposure to low socioeconomic position level such as low education and low social class are significantly associated with high level of C-reactive protein and fibrinogen inflammatory biomarkers, which may cause increased cardiovascular disease risk. Thus, inflammatory biomarkers could be potential mediators to the association of socioeconomic position and cardiovascular risk.
However, in longitudinal studies, researchers often use complete data for analysis and ignore missing values resulting in the loss of important information from non-response data. Particularly, the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing has a high attrition rate caused by individuals non-randomly dropping out of the survey over data collections.
The primary aim of this thesis is to examine whether the levels of adulthood inflammatory biomarkers of C-reactive protein and fibrinogen can be explained by life course socioeconomic position characteristics.
The secondary aim is to evaluate the typologies of missing data and investigate different methods for compensating for missing data. Based on the general mechanisms of missingness: 1. Missingness completely at random (MCAR): when then probability of missingness is the same for all units. 2. Missingness at random (MAR): when the probability of missingness depends only on available information 3. Missingness not at random (MNAR): when missingness depends on unobserved predictors and also depends on the missing value itself.>
Dates
November 2015- November 2018
Funding
ESRC – NWDTC (AQM) +3 Studentship
Institution name
Cathie Marsh Institute of Social Research (CMIST), The University of Manchester
Supervisors
- Professor Natalie Shlomo
- Professor Tarani Chandola
- Dr Alexandru Cernat
Discipline area
Social Statistics
Short biography
Prior to joining CMIST, I completed MSc in Health and Society: Social Epidemiology in the department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University College London and MSc in Health Promotion and Education in the department of Hygiene, Epidemiology and Medical Statistics at the Medical School of Athens, Greece. My Bachelor studies were on Public Health, focusing on the prevalence of Tuberculosis in Greece and Worldwide.
My research interests include social inequalities, life course epidemiology, longitudinal studies and non-response in surveys.
Contact details
CMIST
University of Manchester
G45 Humanities Bridgeford St.Building
M13 9PL
Manchester
Email: georgia.chatzi@manchester.ac.uk
Twitter: @ChatziGeorgia