Fundamental Cause Theory

Social Science Discipline Identification:
Sociology (Medical Sociology, Social Epidemiology) & Economics
Main Tenet Summaries:
Fundamental cause theory (FCT) seeks to answer why there is an association between socioeconomic status and health disparities, even once diseases thought to disproportionately affect low socioeconomic populations have been resolved. Polinijo and Carpiano’s study (2013) looks at how the mechanisms of fundamental cause are created, specifically as they relate to the
Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccination, and attempt to empirically test FCT. The HPV vaccine is targeted at adolescent girls in the hopes that it will prevent cervical cancer. As noted by Polinijo and Carpiano, there have been multiple studies that indicate

Also, because the target population is adolescents, usage is dependent on parental consent. This means parental knowledge and approval are ultimately impacting the cervical cancer rates of future women.
Implications:
The implications of empirically studying fundamental cause theory are the ability to better determine intervention points [such as the school-based, publicly-funded HPV vaccination programs in place in Canada (Wilson et al., 2013)] and help account for differences in access to information for racial/ethnic minorities and low SES populations.
Polinijo and Carpiano determined that lower socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity pose barriers to all three tested adoption stages. However, once initial knowledge is obtained, medical recommendation becomes more significant. In low SES populations with both knowledge and recommendation, the disparities between race and ethnicity are almost eliminated (2013, p121).
As Polinijo and Carpiano noted, “it will be decades before the impact of the HPV vaccine on cervical cancer morbidity and mortality can be directly tested (the median age of cervical