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This paper explores the health and environmental concerns of parents living close to opencast coal mines in the UK and characterises parental risk perceptions in relation to children's asthma status. This qualitative research was undertaken in tandem with an epidemiological investigation aiming to establish whether opencast coal mining adversely affected children's respiratory health. Using a social construction approach, the centrality of health claims in environmental health disputes becomes apparent for a number of claims-makers. We focus on claims of non-activist participants in an epidemiological study, hitherto unknown and unexplored. In all but one case health claims were anticipated rather than realised. No link was found between children's asthma and exacerbation of the condition although some parents of children with asthma had greater concerns during the opencast planning stage. In fact, parents' discourses on children's health largely mirrored the epidemiological findings which showed increased dust, no increase in asthma prevalence but higher rates of general practitioner (GP) consultations for respiratory conditions suggesting that the commonly observed lack of convergence between lay and expert knowledge should not be taken for granted. In spite of this overall lack of an experienced health effect, the sociological data highlight respondents' recognition of the place-specificity of exposures, hence, the reasons why opencast proposals are likely to continue to be met with opposition. Environmental health studies which incorporate epidemiological and social approaches simultaneously have a better chance of arriving at conclusions meaningful to affected communities and facilitate greater understanding of environmental disputes. Keywords: Environmental sociology; Environmental epidemiology; Social construction; Risk perception; Opencast coalmining; Asthma; UK

Recent developments in social science research suggest that social environmental factors may be important for explaining community variations in health. We investigate the structural sources of two mechanisms that produce community variations in health. Using survey data collected from a representative cross-section of British households we examine variations in neighbourhood social capital and neighbourhood social disorganisation across a sample of British neighbourhoods. Adjusting for respondent's attributes, we assess the effects of neighbourhood characteristics measured by the 1991 census in Britain. The results show that concentrated affluence, residential instability and ethnic heterogeneity predict social capital for women. Population density is the only neighbourhood characteristic to predict social capital for men. For both men and women concentrated disadvantage and population density are associated with social disorganisation. Residential instability is additionally associated with social disorganisation for women. For women it was found that neighbourhood characteristics interact with individual social class in accounting for variations in social capital, the effects of neighbourhood characteristics being larger for those in professional and managerial and skilled non-manual occupations. The results show that neighbourhood structural characteristics influence social organisation processes. This helps establish a link between the structural characteristics of neighbourhoods and individual health outcomes. Keywords: Social capital; Social disorganisation; Neighbourhood characteristics: British household panel survey