How are social origin, destination and mobility linked to physical, mental, and self-rated health? Evidence from the United States

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.

Intergenerational Social Mobility and Allostatic Load in Midlife and Older Ages: A Diagonal Reference Modeling Approach

“…Educational attainment was introduced as an alternative measure of SEP to examine whether results were dependent on the socioeconomic measure used in the analysis ( Bulczak et al, 2021 ). Results were ostensibly similar, although the weights for destination were slightly larger in magnitude when examining education over occupational in Table 3 ( Supplementary Table S6 ).…”

Physical attractiveness and cardiometabolic risk

“…The Add Health dataset is rich in information regarding individuals' SEP, cognitive abilities and personality characteristics. We account for individuals' education and occupation, based on the Nam‐Power‐Boyd scale score (Bulczak et al, 2022; Nam & Boyd, 2004), and their household income because these SEP measures are known to be linked with health and may also affect how attractive individuals are perceived (Anderson, 2018; Haas, 2006; Gugushvili et al, 2019; Meier & Mutz, 2020). We convert these categorical (education and occupation) and continuous (income) measures into quintiles for ease of interpretation and comparison across SEP indicators.…”

Physical attractiveness and intergenerational social mobility

“…We create occupational attainment variables for parents and respondents to measure intergenerational occupational mobility based on previous research using Add Health data (Bulczak, Gugushvili, and Zelinska 2022; Dennison 2018; Ueno, Peña‐Talamantes, and Roach 2013). Parental data contain 10 occupational groups.…”