Explaining subjective social status in two countries: The relative importance of education, occupation, income and childhood circumstances

Abstract

In the literature on social inequalities in health, subjective socioeconomic position (SEP) is increasingly applied as a determinant of health, motivated by the hypothesis that having a high subjective SEP is health-enhancing. However, the relative importance of determinants of subjective SEP is not well understood. Objective SEP indicators, such as education, occupation and income, are assumed to determine individuals' position in the status hierarchy. Furthermore, an extensive literature has shown that past childhood SEP affects adult health. Does it also affect subjective SEP? In this paper, we estimate the relative importance of i) the common objective SEP indicators (education, occupation and income) in explaining subjective SEP, and ii) childhood SEP (childhood financial circumstances and parents' education) in determining subjective SEP, after controlling for objective SEP. Given that the relative importance of these factors is expected to differ across institutional settings, we compare data from two countries: Australia and Norway. We use data from an online survey based on adult samples, with N ≈ 1400 from each country. Ordinary least squares regression is conducted to assess how objective and childhood SEP indicators predict subjective SEP. We use Shapley value decomposition to estimate the relative importance of these factors in explaining subjective SEP. Income was the strongest predictor of subjective SEP in Australia; in Norway, it was occupation. Of the childhood SEP variables, childhood financial circumstances were significantly associated with subjective SEP, even after controlling for objective SEP. This association was the strongest in the Norwegian sample. Only the mother's education had a significant impact on subjective SEP. Our findings highlight the need to understand the specific mechanisms between objective and subjective SEP as determinants of inequalities in health, and to assess the role of institutional factors in influencing these complex relationships.

What are the Trends and Explanations of Perceived Social Mobility in Poland?

“…It is also not surprising that a change in the household income is an important predictor of a change in the perceived social mobility. Our finding that perceived social status is an important predictor of social mobility perceptions contributes to the growing literature on the strong explanatory power of subjective social position for various life outcomes (Demakakos et al, 2008;Lindberg et al, 2021;Präg 2020). In the Polish context, Domanski (2004) has previously argued that a subjective feeling of social mobility or retaining one's position is due to multiple factors, but is primarily due to the comparison of one's position to that of the other members of society.…”

“…This interest is largely motivated by normative concerns for equality of opportunity and policy measures that can be employed to make societies fairer and more just (Ludwinek et al, 2017;Narayan et al, 2018). As is the case for other subjective aspects of individuals' socioeconomic position (Jackson & Grusky, 2018;Lindberg et al, 2021;Ritterman et al, 2009), scholars have recently begun to inquire about how individuals perceive their intergenerational social mobility.…”

Extending the EQ-5D: the case for a complementary set of 4 psycho-social dimensions

“…Respondents from Australia and Norway were recruited in December 2018–February 2019, with a targeting sample size of 1400 in each country. The final sample consists of 1423 in Australia and 1400 in Norway (for details see Lindberg et al [ 18 ]). Respondents were randomly selected to either of three versions of the questionnaire varying by how the bolt-on dimensions and their severity levels were described.…”

“…Subjective social status represents a different concept from the more objective indicators of socio-economic position, such as education and income (see Lindberg et al [ 18 ]). Thus, it is included in separate analyses to check the robustness of the findings.…”

An Association Between Montessori Education in Childhood and Adult Wellbeing

“…In addition, they were asked how they would describe their family's social class when they were 3-12 years old, with five options: lower/working, lower middle, middle, upper middle, and upper. Similar scales have been successfully used in other studies to measure adults' estimates of their childhood SES (Straughen et al, 2013;Listl et al, 2018;Lindberg et al, 2021). Childhood SES is highly related to child outcomes (Reardon, 2011;Duncan and Murnane, 2014), and a meta-analysis showed that one's own estimate of one's SES (often called SSS, for subjective social status) is more strongly related to wellbeing than is one's actual SES (Tang et al, 2016).…”