A Life Course Perspective on the Relationship between Socio-economic Status and Health: Testing the Divergence Hypothesis

Abstract

While adults from all socio-economic status (SES) levels generally encounter a decline in health as they grow older, research shows that health status is tied to SES at all stages of life. The dynamics of the relationship between SES and health over the life course of adult Canadians, however, remain largely unexplored. This paper tests the divergence hypothesis, which postulates that the SES-based gap in health widens with age, using a representative sample of Canadians aged 25 to 79 from the 1994/1995 National Population Health Survey. Multiple linear regression analyses show support for this assumption; that is, the relationship between SES (measured by years of education and annual household income) and health (measured by self-rated and functional health indexes) strengthens with age. The results of this study provide insight and answers about healthy aging among Canadians.

Being Homeless and Becoming Housed: The Interplay of Fateful Moments and Social Support in Neo-liberal Context

“…As well, we recognize that a life course perspective may be perceived as most rigorously applied and theorized through longitudinal research in general, and through ethnographic methods in particular. In this paper, our approach follows research in sociology that draws on insights from a life course perspective to interpret cross-sectional quantitative (Prus, 2004), mixed methods (Cooke & Gazso, 2007;McDonald, 2011), and qualitative data (Allen & Picket, 1987;McDaniel, Gazso & Duncan, 2016). Such cross-sectional research is thought to reflect the life course perspective in the design of (open or close-ended) questions written to enable participants to provide an overview of life course events and transitions retrospectively, in the present, and prospectively.…”

Longitudinal analysis of income-related health inequalities: methods, challenges and applications

“…Both agree that lower socioeconomic status and lacking resources are associated with less healthy lifestyles, higher health risks, a faster decline of health status and higher mortality rates. The disadvantage accumulation hypothesis contends that social gradients in health develop in early life and become stronger as socioeconomic and health disadvantages accumulate over the complete life course [36][37][38][39][40][41]. The age as leveler hypothesis is consistent with the disadvantage accumulation hypothesis to some extent, but adds the assumption that the decline of health is an unavoidable part of aging.…”

Age–social stratification designs had a negligible impact on income–mortality associations

“…Moreover, given that the magnitude of SESeoutcome associations may attenuate with age [6,7e9], ageesocial stratification designs require sufficiently large sample sizes within each age stratum, to adequately represent the subgroup and/or population of interest. Consequently, many researchers have not incorporated ageesocial stratification designs in SESeoutcomes research [5,6,8,9,11]. To date, no study has formally evaluated whether SESeoutcomes associations differ between techniques that use ageesocial stratification and those which incorporate absolute SES thresholds that apply equally to all ages.…”