Injury is an important health issue[1, 2]. Injury is a major contributor to morbidity, disability, and even early mortality; unexpected death that shortens life expectancy further results in increased social loss and economic costs[3]. According to a report from the World Health Organization, about 5 million people, 83.7 per 100,000, worldwide died due to injuries in 2000. This accounts for 9% of global mortality, and the cost for treating them totaled about 12% of all medical costs worldwide[4]. Thus despite the major health impact of injury, it has drawn relatively little attention among health-related concerns[5]. The situation is particularly serious in the Republic of Korea. According to OECD health data published in 2007, Korea had the second highest rate of injury associated fatalities (67.5 per 100,000) among OECD countries in 2004. This number accounted for 12.4% of all mortalities in Korea that year, and this proportion was the highest among OECD nations[6]. As injury mechanisms have been analyzed and comprehended, perceptions about injury have now shifted from seeing them as the consequences of random and unavoidable accidents to preventable accidents in most cases. In accordance with this changed appreciation about injury, several countries have been collecting data related to injuries for analysis purposes in order to develop effective policies to prevent further injuries[7].

Injuries can be categorized into fatal and nonfatal injuries. A fatal injury is defined as death resulting from the combination of all injuries sustained, and a nonfatal injury is an acute impact, short of death, on one’s health from an external force or agent[8]. The causes of both fatal and nonfatal injuries are known to vary by age and sex[8]; exposure to mechanochemical agents, unsafe work environment or activities[9, 10], and stress and individual physiological characteristics[10–12] have been noted to be sources of injury. In addition, social surroundings, including physical and socioeconomic factors, are also considered to contribute to injury[13]. Haddon’s matrix describes injury as the result of interaction among a person, a causative agent, and the external environment[14]. Socioeconomic status represents the relative social position of an individual or a group that is determined by income, occupation, assets, level of education, and similar factors, and it is known to affect both individuals and external environmental factors within Haddon’s matrix[15, 16]. Thus, the importance of socioeconomic factors to injury must not be underestimated. Although injury is related to level of income, occupation type, job status, and other socioeconomic factors, a limited number of studies in Korea have dealt with injury in relation to socioeconomic status. One study reported a higher incidence of injury in groups with low education levels, certain vocations that are vulnerable to injury, and low income[17, 18]. Another study reported that people with higher income levels and city-dwellers had a significantly smaller proportion of injury than those with a low income or who resided in rural areas, respectively, within a given population group[7].

This study is based on data from the fourth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES), which contains questions for identifying the incidence of injury and accidents in workers, along with their socioeconomic and occupational characteristics. We analyzed the data to identify various characteristics of injury according to socioeconomic status and to confirm the relationship between the incidence of injury and socioeconomic level.

This study determined the total occurrence of injuries in the general population of Korea and the incidence of occupationally related injury using answers related to injury from the KNHANES questionnaire and analyzed its association with socioeconomic factors. The proportion of subjects who sustained at least 1 injury in the 1-year period previous to the survey was 6.7%, and among the injured subjects, 2.4% were work-related injuries. Occupational injury accounted for 36.4% of all the reported injuries. In the Korean Working Conditions Survey sponsored by the Korean Department of Labor in 2006, 2010, and 2011, the average injury rate was 2.4%. The rate of occupational injury was 2%, and workplace injuries accounted for 84% of all the injuries received. A similar survey of 27 EU nations in 2005 revealed a mean injury rate of 9.1% (3.7%-21.5%)[21]. In the present study, the occupational injury rate was 2.4%, which was similar to the findings of the Korean Working Conditions Survey, but lower than the European average.

In previous studies, it was found that each increased level of socioeconomic status shows a better health status than the level below it in a dose–response relationship[22], and this socioeconomic gradient is evident in both fatal[23–34] and non-fatal injuries[26, 28, 35–40]. We found the same in our study. As the levels of income and education increased, the injury incidence was reduced. The group with an annual income of more than 50 million won had an odds ratio of 0.54 (95% C.I.: 0.34-0.86) relative to the group with an income of less than 5 million won, and the group with a home valued at more than 500 million won had an odds ratio of 0.65 (95% C.I.: 0.43-0.96) compared to the group with a home valued at less than 50 million won. People with an elementary school education or below had an odds ratio of 1.89 (95% C.I.: 1.44-2.48) relative to those with a university or higher education. The injury rates that required a visit to an outpatient clinic and emergency room (Table 5) and that needed hospital admission were also higher in vulnerable socioeconomic groups who earned low income, had less education, owned a less expensive home, and worked in elementary labor. The results of our study were in accord with 2 previous studies.

The type of occupation and job status can also be factored in to consider the socioeconomic status[17]. The ‘craft, equipment, machine operating, and assembling worker’ group had the highest injury incidence of 10.6% among all of the occupational groups. ‘Skilled agricultural, forestry, and fishery worker’ (7.7%), ‘elementary worker’ (7.5%), ‘service and sales worker’ (6.1%), ‘clerk’ (6.7%), and ‘managerial and professional worker’ (6.0%) groups followed in that order, revealing concurrence with previous study results showing that manual labor has a higher risk of injury[24, 26, 31, 36]. The unemployed had a significantly lower injury incidence than those with jobs, and their rate of seeking medical attention from an outpatient clinic or emergency room was also lower than those of the other groups. In addition, the unemployed group reported lower odds of injury than the other groups, and the group showed a particularly significant reduction in the odds of injury compared to ‘skilled agricultural, forestry, and fishery worker’, ‘craft, equipment, machine operating, and assembling worker’, and ‘elementary worker’ groups. This information contradicts previous studies reporting slightly but not significantly higher injury odds of 1.03 in the jobless than in those who were employed[17]. Our finding provides evidence that having a job may elevate injury risk. Our study also noted the smallest total number of injuries (5.7%) and injury risk in all subjects in the unemployed group, but the hospital admission rate, which reflects the severity of injury, was 2.3%, which was higher than the rate found in the white-collar worker group. This is in accord with a previous study that found the risk of mortality for jobless people was 2.26 times higher than that of other groups[17]. The reason for the higher risk can be explained by reports that noted a relationship with higher incidences of violent crime[30] and suicide[25].

Socioeconomic status is known to affect injury risk through a complex process. The causes of injuries originating from socioeconomic discrimination are psychosocial factors such as stress from poverty and intentional self-inflicted injury due to the stress from inequality as a result, raising the quality of material factors such as providing a livable income and adequate housing is effective in lowering the injury risk[17]. Lower socioeconomic status may result from poor housing and transportation, higher crime rates, and underemployment[26, 41–43]. In addition to physical factors, there are occupation-related factors that also affect injury incidence[44]. Socioeconomic factors are also influenced by a geographical factor that has been interpreted as the degree of accessibility to various appropriate public services such as secure public safety measures, safe road, and recreational area. Also, a prosperous town has low crime rate. It has been suggested that the low crime rate is due to limiting strangers from accessing the town and encouraging good behavior among members of the community, and these positive activities have some protective value in preventing injury[11]. Those with a low socioeconomic level are likely to neglect the fact that injury is preventable, and this inattention may function as a factor that leads to the potential for injury[45]. A parent’s socioeconomic status is also an important factor in injury risk for children. Although the effect varies by the age and sex of a child, a parent’s efforts in providing their children with appropriate education, housing, and injury preventative measures are presently considered imperative for reducing injury risk[46–52].

There present some limitations for this study. This study’s variables are obtained from a questionnaire and interview, and it is possible that the study is biased with recall bias from subjects. During the survey, surveyors tried to visit each subjects to obtain data directly. Data was not available from those who were admitted to a hospital or had deceased, and data from these subjects may be left out for interpretation. However, possibility of selection bias that may underestimates injury incidence is low, because fourth KNHANES was carried out as an individualized interview to each subject without knowing subjects’ trauma histories. Future studies further need more in-depth interviews and objective reviews on data to improve the analysis, and it is also considered that supplementing questions related injury, training surveyors, standardization of indicators, and checking reliability and validity of indicators are necessary to refine the outcomes in future studies. In this study, only a person’s income was taken in for socioeconomic evaluation, but the future studies need to consider obtaining more information on a person’s asset including car and financial asset for multidimensional interpretation. Lastly, there present a limitation to examine causal relationship between socioeconomic state and injury in this study, because it was a cross-section study. In order to investigate the causal relationship, a prospective cohort study is required.

Despite these limitations, by using the answers to the injury-related questions of the fourth KNHANES, this study was able to confirm the differences in injury incidence among various socioeconomic levels represented by differing education levels, incomes, home values, and types of occupations. Furthermore, the authors investigated the relationship between socioeconomic status and injury and confirmed that lower income and education levels were associated with a statistically significant increase in the odds of injury. In addition, the groups with jobs had a higher risk of injury than the unemployed group, and manual laborers had significantly elevated injury risk. Through this study, it was determined that many injuries have preventable aspects, and vulnerable socioeconomic groups were identified as being an important focus for injury risk management. Information on the frequency of injury and conditions inciting injury enables the recognition of injury severity and characteristics and also provides a basis for the development of injury prevention and management policy[2]. A gradual multistage approach to injury-related problems and the selection of groups who need priority intervention are necessary to reduce injury incidence[7]. Developing interventions will require identifying the present state of injury, followed by recognizing causes and factors that are associated with injury. This information can be used to work out a basis for the distribution of available resources to prevent and manage injuries. We believe that the results of this study can be used as a reference for selection of a group in Korea that requires priority in receiving intervention.