socioeconomic position affects health throughout the life course in what 2 main ways

Socioeconomic position has also been shown to be linked to negative health outcomes during pregnancy and infancy, as well as among the elderly, and the associations have also been documented using measures of physical disability and self-reported health.

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Does socioeconomic position affect health outcomes?

Aug 04, 2021 · 1. Introduction. Socioeconomic position is a fundamental cause of health disparities [ 1 ]. Those occupying higher rungs on the socioeconomic ladder tend to experience lower rates of morbidity and mortality compared to those placed lower in the social hierarchy [ …

What is socioeconomic position (SEP)?

Purpose: This study evaluated the association of life-course economic trajectory with health-related quality of life in patients with diabetes mellitus. Methods: The study subjects were 183 outpatients over 20 years of age with diabetes mellitus. A questionnaire was administered to collect information about current and childhood economic status, and health-related quality of …

What drives social inequality in health status?

Aug 14, 1998 · While the overall relationship of SES to mortality may attenuate in older ages, socioeconomic position continues to be linked to the prevalence of disability and chronic and degenerative diseases, including cardiovascular disease, many cancers, and …

What is the best indicator of socioeconomic status prediction (Sep)?

As with other indicators such as education, income has a “dose‐response” association with health, 46,47 and can influence a wide range of material circumstances with direct implications for health. 2,3 Income also has a cumulative effect over the life course 48 and is the SEP indicator that can change most on a short term basis, although this dynamic aspect is rarely taken into …

How do socioeconomic factors affect health?

Social and economic factors, such as income, education, employment, community safety, and social supports can significantly affect how well and how long we live. These factors affect our ability to make healthy choices, afford medical care and housing, manage stress, and more.

How does socioeconomic status affect life?

SES affects overall human functioning, including our physical and mental health. Low SES and its correlates, such as lower educational achievement, poverty, and poor health, ultimately affect our society.

What three things affect socioeconomic status?

Socioeconomic status is typically broken into three levels (high, middle, and low) to describe the three places a family or an individual may fall into. When placing a family or individual into one of these categories, any or all of the three variables (income, education, and occupation) can be assessed.

How does socioeconomic status affect community health?

Individuals either living in poverty or near the poverty line are more likely to have problems with access to health care, have lower rates of health care utilization, and report that they have less satisfaction with care than individuals with higher SES scores [24, 27, 28].Jun 18, 2013

How does socioeconomic affect health and wellbeing?

Generally, people in lower socioeconomic groups are at greater risk of poor health, have higher rates of illness, disability and death, and live shorter lives than people from higher socioeconomic groups (Mackenbach 2015).Feb 14, 2022

How does socioeconomic status affect health and health outcomes at the individual community and national levels?

There is evidence that socioeconomic status (SES) affects individual's health outcomes and the health care they receive. People of lower SES are more likely to have worse self-reported health,5,6 lower life expectancy,7 and suffer from more chronic conditions8-11 when compared with those of higher SES.Mar 8, 2017

How socio economic factors affect education?

Socioeconomic factors, such as family income level, parents' level of education, race and gender, all influence the quality and availability of education as well as the ability of education to improve life circumstances.Jun 25, 2018

What is socioeconomic impact study?

Definition: quantitative evaluation of the utility of projects and public policies, i.e. their creation of collective value net of costs. This method allows all social, environmental, economic and financial impacts of a project or public policy to be measured in a monetary unit.

What is socioeconomic position?

(1997), socioeconomic position is defined as an “aggregate concept that includes both resource-based and prestige-based measures, as linked to both childhood and adult social class position ” (p. 345). In this tradition, inequality is mainly a hierarchical series of layers pertaining to unequal size of resources able to affect health. Typical measures of socioeconomic position, based on different degrees of resource and prestige, respectively, are education, income, and occupation. The interchangeable use of these indicators in social inequalities research has often been cautioned, as Krieger (2001a) notes that “ (g)iven distinctions between resource-based and prestige-based aspects of socioeconomic position and the diverse pathways by which they affect health, epidemiological studies should state clearly how measures of socioeconomic position are conceptualized” (p. 697). Geyer et al. (2006) show in mortality data of Sweden and Germany that income, occupation, and education reflect different social phenomena and their associations with health outcomes relate to different underlying causal mechanisms.

What is the association between socioeconomic position and cause-specific mortality and morbidity?

In addition, the association between socioeconomic position and cause-specific mortality and morbidity has been studied in detail for almost every class of disease. In some instances, the association has been extended to measures of subclinical disease, most notably for psychiatric and cardiovascular outcomes.

What is the most commonly used outcome in socioeconomic studies?

A diverse set of health outcomes has been associated with socioeconomic position. Mortality is the most commonly used outcome; all-cause mortality is a robust indicator of health that is unlikely to be subject to some of the biases that may threaten the validity of epidemiologic studies.

What are the negative effects of lower SEP?

Nonetheless, lower SEP is generally associated with poorer housing, less nutritious diet, greater exposure to adverse environmental substances, poorer working conditions, greater exposure to crime and dangerous environments, and a wide variety of other ‘material’ and psychosocial factors.

What is social mobility?

Social mobility can be described as intragenerational, when an individual moves between SEP within a lifetime, or more typically as intergenerational, whereby SEP changes across generations (e.g., from parental SEP during the participant's childhood to the participant's adult SEP).

What is low SEP?

For instance, low SEP is linked with an inadequate diet which could be the factor leading to poor health. Similarly social selection refers to the possibility of reverse causation, where poor health may lead to low SEP (by for instance limiting the occupation level of the individual).

Which causes of death were more common among women than men?

Causes of death with small (most cancers) or reversed (breast cancer) socioeconomic differentials were more common among women than men. Causes with large differentials (accidents and violence, lung cancer, coronary heart disease), on the other hand, were more common among men.

How are family socioeconomic status and child health related?

Family socioeconomic status (SES) and child health are so strongly related that scholars have speculated child health to be an important pathway through which a cycle of poverty is reproduced across generations. Despite increasing recognition that SES and health work reciprocally and dynamically over the life course to produce inequality, research has yet to address how these two pathways simultaneously shape children’s development. Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and marginal structural models, we ask three questions: (1) how does the reciprocal relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage and child health affect estimates of each circumstance on children’s cognitive development?; (2) how do their respective effects vary with age?; and (3) do family SES and child health have differential effects on cognitive development across population subgroups? The results show that the negative effects of socioeconomic disadvantage and poor health are insensitive to their reciprocal relationships over time. We find divergent effects of socioeconomic disadvantage and poor health on children’s cognitive trajectories, with a widening pattern for family SES effects and a leveling-off pattern for child health effects. Finally, the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage are similar across all racial/ethnic groups, while the effects of child health are largely driven by white children. We discuss theoretical and policy implications of these findings for future research.

What is social causation and health selection?

This research investigates the merits of the "social causation" and "health selection" explanations for associations between socioeconomic status and self-reported overall health, musculoskeletal health and depression. Using data that include information about individuals' SES and health from childhood through late adulthood, I employ structural equation models that account for errors in measured variables and that allow for explicit tests of various hypotheses about how SES and health are related. For each outcome and for both women and men the results provide no support for the health selection hypothesis. SES affects each health outcome at multiple points in the life course, but the reverse is not true.

How long has life expectancy increased?

Life expectancy has increased in the last decades of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century, for instance, in the United Kingdom from 66.3 years in 1946 to 82.0 in 2015. However, the evidence on trends in other key health indicators, such as non-communicable conditions or disability, has been inconsistent. The systematic review of 53 studies found no evidence for improvement in the age-standardised or age-specific prevalence of any of the studied major chronic conditions over the last few decades, apart from Alzheimer’s disease. The evidence on trends in disability, expressed as prevalence or health expectancy was inconclusive. In the secondary analyses of the 1958 and 1970 British birth cohorts, with the total sample of n=16,834, I found that the prevalence of multimorbidity was higher in the younger cohort: 24.3% vs 17.8% at age 42-48. Across both cohorts, early-life parental social class, birthweight, cognitive ability and body mass index at age 10/11, internalising and externalising problems at 16 were associated with multimorbidity at age 42-48. A higher prevalence of morbidity in younger birth cohorts was not limited to physical health. In the comparison across the 1946, 1958 and 1970 British birth cohorts (n=28,362), progressively younger birth cohorts had higher levels of mental health symptoms across adulthood. Worsening health across progressively younger birth cohorts has also been observed in Sweden, in the analysis of the Uppsala Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study. Successively younger birth cohorts (1915-1972) had a higher prevalence of hospitalisation at overlapping ages, with inter-cohort differences emerging from early- 4 adulthood and increasing with age in absolute terms. Those with medium and low parental socioeconomic position (vs high) had respectively 13% and 20% higher odds of experiencing hospitalisation during the observation period (1989-2008)—when age, year-of-birth and gender were accounted for. Hence, rising life expectancy has not translated into improving health and reduced hospitalisation, associated with non-communicable conditions, both in Great Britain and Sweden. This is likely to translate in greater demands on healthcare and public services.

How does well being affect children?

Well-being in childhood can have lasting effects on individual children, and on entire cohorts of children, as they grow older. Two paradigmatic approaches to the life course provide unique and complementary lenses for understanding child well-being. The personological paradigm raises sensitivity to dynamics of child well-being over time. This includes attention to earlier experiences that shape well-being during childhood and, more importantly, to how well-being in childhood shapes future outcomes. The institutional paradigm raises sensitivity to the role of distal social factors (especially beyond immediate interpersonal relationships) that comprise child well-being, produce it, or moderate or mediate its effects. These often-invisible forces (such as demographic conditions, historical events, or welfare states) have direct and indirect effects on children’s well-being, especially as the life course is being reconfigured for parents, grandparents, and other adults on whom children rely. The chapter ends with some reflections on specific skills that may be particularly useful to children today as they make the transition to adulthood.

How does back pain affect society?

Back pain is a major health problem in the Western World impacting on individuals, their families and the whole society. Back pain causes significant economic costs due to health expenses and absenteeism from work. Most cases of back pain respond well to treatments and are resolved within weeks. However, some individuals do not respond well to medical treatments and experience persistent back pain that becomes chronic in nature. Chronic back pain is characterised by its duration and its poor response to medical interventions. The literature researched indicated that in most cases the experience of chronic back pain is heavily influenced by psychosocial factors, which impact on individuals more than the original injury or disease. There is limited literature in relation to biopsychosocial factors and treatment up-take. The aim of this study was to explore the impact of biopsychosocial factors in the experience of chronic back pain. It was hypothesised that biopsychosocial factors would have an impact on the number of treatments received and the level of disability reported. A total of 201 adult participants (men and women) completed a battery of questionnaires that collected demographic information, psychological distress, social support, pain levels and disability scores. The findings indicated that psychosocial factors had a greater impact on the number of treatment sessions and reported disability than level and/or duration of pain. Education level was the strongest marker for both hypotheses with tertiary educated participants reporting significantly higher numbers of treatment sessions and lower disability scores. The findings of this study supported the Biopsychosocial Model of Health and the Theory of Social Causation. In addition, the findings supported previous research that advocated that a diagnosis of chronic back pain is a unique condition different from acute or temporary pain. Furthermore, the findings supported the creation of new diagnostic and measurement tools for chronic back that include psychological and social measures in addition to biological indicators. Finally, the findings offered renewed backing for interdisciplinary approaches to the treatment of chronic back pain in light to its multifaceted nature.

What is the cumulative advantage hypothesis?

According to the cumulative (dis)advantage hypothesis, social disparities in health increase over the life course. Evidence on this hypothesis is largely limited to the U.S. context. The present dissertation draws on recent theoretical and methodological advances to test the cumulative (dis)advantage hypothesis in two other contexts – Sweden and West Germany. Three empirical studies examine the core association between socioeconomic position and health (a) from a life-course perspective considering individual change, (b) from a cohort perspective considering socio-historical change, and (c) from a comparative perspective considering cross-national differences. The analyses are based on large-scale longitudinal data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey, the German Socio-economic Panel Study, the Health and Retirement Study, and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. The key analytical constructs are education as a measure of socioeconomic position and self-rated health, mobility limitations, and chronic conditions as measures of health. The results show large differences within countries and between countries in the age patterns and cohort patterns of change in health inequality. In the U.S., educational gaps in health widen strongly over the life course, and this divergence intensifies across cohorts. In Sweden, health gaps are much smaller, widen only moderately with age, and remain stable across cohorts. In Germany, health gaps widen with age and across cohorts, but these patterns pertain only to men. Taken together, these findings show that health inequality across lives and cohorts is mitigated in Western European welfare states, which target social inequality in health-related resources. In the U.S. context, which is characterized by a lack of social security, unequal access to health care, and large social disparities in quality of living, health inequality increases across lives and cohorts.