The contemporaneous association between higher socioeconomic position and better health is well established. Life course research has also demonstrated a lasting effect of childhood socioeconomic conditions on adult health and well-being. Yet, little is known about the separate health effects of intergenerational mobility—moving into a different socioeconomic position than one’s parents—among early adults in the United States. Most studies on the health implications of mobility rely on cross-sectional datasets, which makes it impossible to differentiate between health selection and social causation effects. In addition, understanding the effects of social mobility on health at a relatively young age has been hampered by the paucity of health measures that reliably predict disease onset. Analysing 4,713 respondents aged 25 to 32 from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health’s Waves I and IV, we use diagonal reference models to separately identify the effects of socioeconomic origin and destination, as well as social mobility on allostatic load among individuals in the United States. Using a combined measure of educational and occupational attainment, and accounting for individuals’ initial health, we demonstrate that in addition to health gradient among the socially immobile, individuals’ socioeconomic origin and destination are equally important for multi-system physiological dysregulation. Short-range upward mobility also has a positive and significant association with health. After mitigating health selection concerns in our observational data, this effect is observed only among those reporting poor health before experiencing social mobility. Our findings move towards the reconciliation of two theoretical perspectives, confirming the positive effect of upward mobility as predicted by the “rags to riches” perspective, while not contradicting potential costs associated with more extensive upward mobility experiences as predicted by the dissociative thesis.

No abstract

For decades, scholars have been exploring persistent inequalities in health by studying the roles of origin and destination socioeconomic positions (SEP), and the importance of social mobility trajectories from childhood to adult life in individuals’ wellbeing. However, this literature does not produce consistent and systematic findings on the relative importance of origin and destination SEP and independent social mobility effects. One of the main reasons for this is a set of methodological choices and decisions which researchers make. Arguably, one of the most critical aspects of research design is the operationalisation of SEP and the selection of health outcomes, usually without accounting for initial values of the health indicators employed. Using a nationally representative longitudinal dataset (Add Health) for the United States and diagonal reference models, in the present study, we examine how the choice of SEP in terms of educational, occupational, and income attainment, and the choice of health measures in terms of obesity, depressive symptoms, and self-rated health, influence findings on the origin and destination effects, as well as the health implications of social mobility. We also address the health selection problem by explicitly accounting for adolescents’ health in terms of each health outcome considered. Our results indicate that both choosing SEP and health measures, and accounting for social mobility and adolescent health have a noticeable impact on the relative importance of social origin and destination positions for health outcomes. We do not find evidence that social mobility has an independent effect on health, or that individuals’ previous health status moderates this association.