Living Healthier and Longer: A Life Course Perspective on Education and Health

Johnson, Monica; Staff, Jeremy; Schulenberg, John E.; Patrick, Megan E.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20880-0_17

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…Beyond these four groups of mechanisms that have received the most attention by investigators, many others have been examined, such as stress, cognitive and noncognitive skills, or environmental exposures (11; 43). Several excellent reviews further discuss mechanisms (2; 36; 66; 70; 93).…”

Section: The Association Between Education and Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The completion of 14 rather than 13 years (without the completion of associated degree) could be associated with better health through the accumulation of additional knowledge and skills as well, or perhaps could be without health returns, if it is associated with poor grades, stigma linked to dropping out of college, or accumulated debt (63; 76). Examining the functional form of the education-health association can shed light on how and why education is beneficial for health (70). For instance, studies found that mortality gradually declines with years of schooling at low levels of educational attainment, with large discontinuities at high school and college degree attainment (56; 98).…”

Section: Toward a Socially-embedded Understanding Of The Education-hementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unfortunately, prior research has generally operationalized the differences in educational opportunities as confounders of the education-health association or as “selection bias” to be statistically controlled, or best as a moderating influence (10; 19). Rather than remove the important life course effects from the equation, studies that seek to understand how educational and health differences unfold over the life course, and even across generations could yield greater insight (50; 70). A life course, multigenerational approach can provide important recommendations for interventions seeking to avoid the unintended consequence of increasing disparities.…”

Section: Toward a Socially-embedded Understanding Of The Education-hementioning

confidence: 99%

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The Relationship Between Education and Health: Reducing Disparities Through a Contextual Approach

Zajacova

Lawrence

2024

Annual Review of Public Health

645

412

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Adults with higher educational attainment live healthier and longer lives compared with their less educated peers. The disparities are large and widening. We posit that understanding the educational and macrolevel contexts in which this association occurs is key to reducing health disparities and improving population health. In this article, we briefly review and critically assess the current state of research on the relationship between education and health in the United States. We then outline three directions for further research: We extend the conceptualization of education beyond attainment and demonstrate the centrality of the schooling process to health; we highlight the dual role of education as a driver of opportunity but also as a reproducer of inequality; and we explain the central role of specific historical sociopolitical contexts in which the education-health association is embedded. Findings from this research agenda can inform policies and effective interventions to reduce health disparities and improve health for all Americans. URGENT NEED FOR NEW DIRECTIONS IN EDUCATION-HEALTH RESEARCHAmericans have worse health than people in other high-income countries and have been falling further behind in recent decades (137). This pattern is partially due to the large health inequalities and poor health of adults with low education (84). Understanding the health benefits of education is thus integral to reducing health disparities and improving the well-being of twenty-first-century populations. Despite extensive prior research, critical questions about the education-health relationship remain unanswered, in part because education and health are intertwined over the life spans within and across generations and are inextricably embedded in the broader social context. We posit that to inform future educational and heath policy effectively, we need to capture education in action as it generates and constrains opportunity during the early life spans of today's cohorts. First, we need to expand our operationalization of education beyond attainment to consider the long-term educational process that precedes the attainment and its effect on health. Second, we need to reconceptualize education not only as a vehicle for social success, valuable resources, and good health, but also as an institution that reproduces inequality across generations. And third, we argue that investigators need to bring historical, social, and policy contexts into the heart of analyses: How does the education-health association vary across place and time, and how do political forces influence that variation?During the past several generations, education has become the principal pathway to financial security, stable employment, and social success (8). At the same time, American youth have experienced increasingly unequal educational opportunities that depend on the schools they attend, the neighborhoods in which they live, the color of their skin, and families' financial resources. The decline in manufacturing and rise of globali...

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Section: The Association Between Education and Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Toward a Socially-embedded Understanding Of The Education-hementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Toward a Socially-embedded Understanding Of The Education-hementioning

confidence: 99%

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The Relationship Between Education and Health: Reducing Disparities Through a Contextual Approach

Zajacova

Lawrence

2024

Annual Review of Public Health

645

412

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“…In doing so, we emphasize the dynamics of early skill formation, prior to school entry (Entwisle and Alexander 1993), as well as the effects of early schooling (Berhman et al 2015; Muennig 2015; Smith-Greenaway 2015) and their role in educational attainment deep into the life course. Together, these frame the social context of a “critical period” for skill formation and suggest an alternative life course model to that which dominates sociological research (e.g., Hayward et al 2015; Kirkpatrick Johnson et al 2016; Ross and Wu 1995). Our model also emphasizes the idea of life course contingency and how experiences at particular points of the life course have unique salience and consequences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Schooling, Skills, and Self-rated Health

Duke

Macmillan

2016

Sociol Educ

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Education is a key sociological variable in the explanation of health and health disparities. Conventional wisdom emphasizes a life course-human capital perspective with expectations of causal effects that are quasi-linear, large in magnitude for high levels of educational attainment, and reasonably robust in the face of measured and unmeasured explanatory factors. We challenge this wisdom by offering an alternative theoretical account and an empirical investigation organized around the role of measured and unmeasured cognitive and noncognitive skills as confounders in the association between educational attainment and health. Based on longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 spanning mid-adolescence through early adulthood, results indicate that (1) effects of educational attainment are vulnerable to issues of omitted variable bias, (2) measured indicators of cognitive and noncognitive skills account for a significant proportion of the traditionally observed effect of educational attainment, (3) such skills have effects larger than that of even the highest levels of educational attainment when appropriate controls for unmeasured heterogeneity are incorporated, and (4) models that most stringently control for such time-stable abilities show little evidence of a substantive association between educational attainment and health.

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“…These so-called social determinants of health are now widely accepted to be core contributors to the health of populations, as indicated by a substantial body of empirical work. We know, for example, that income and education fundamentally shape health through the life course, that disparities by sex and ethnicity affect health outcomes, that characteristics of place (including the built environment) determine opportunities for health-promoting behavior and access to healthcare resources, and that public policies, market incentives, and commercial forces are inextricably linked with the conditions that ultimately generate health [1][2][3][4]. This has led to recognition of the centrality of these concepts by public health scholars and governmental organizations at all levels.…”

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confidence: 99%

Social determinants of health, data science, and decision-making: Forging a transdisciplinary synthesis

Galea

Abdalla

Sturchio³

2020

PLoS Med

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Two parallel, intellectual strands that seldom intersect have emerged in our evolving understanding of health and health systems over the past couple of decades. First is the growing appreciation of the role that social and economic factors play in shaping health. These so-called social determinants of health are now widely accepted to be core contributors to the health of populations, as indicated by a substantial body of empirical work. We know, for example, that income and education fundamentally shape health through the life course, that disparities by sex and ethnicity affect health outcomes, that characteristics of place (including the built environment) determine opportunities for health-promoting behavior and access to healthcare resources, and that public policies, market incentives, and commercial forces are inextricably linked with the conditions that ultimately generate health [1][2][3][4]. This has led to recognition of the centrality of these concepts by public health scholars and governmental organizations at all levels. The 2008 report of WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, chaired by Michael Marmot, was a landmark study in this area [5]. The United States Department of Health and Human Services has advocated for Public Health 3.0, which urges thinking beyond clinical settings to include complementary perspectives from community institutions to link prevention and treatment with social, economic, and environmental factors that help explain patterns of disease in given populations. Several books have translated these ideas for the general public [6,7], and slowly, the political-and private-sector conversation is also beginning to recognize the role that social determinants play in health.A second strand has followed the emergence of technologies that can collect data that characterize our biology, how we live, and the forces with which we intersect with far greater granularity than was ever possible before. These "big data" approaches (characterized typically by large volumes of data, collected quickly, and varied across levels of human organization [e.g., from the biological to the social]) have paved the way for unprecedented, new opportunities for measuring, analyzing, and documenting individual and population health. In particular, these approaches (enabled by new data-analytic tools from artificial intelligence and machine learning) have deployed new data sources and new technologies that can improve health and improve decision-making at the individual and community level. The potential of big data to improve health is becoming apparent both in the genomic revolution that has created an enormous growth in precision medicine approaches to health and in the digital revolution more broadly. These technological advances have made it possible to obtain more data about aspects of human activity, behavior, and context. Recent developments in genomics, big data, and artificial intelligence offer intriguing prospects for the development of a new discipline of

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Living Healthier and Longer: A Life Course Perspective on Education and Health

Cited by 13 publications

References 77 publications

The Relationship Between Education and Health: Reducing Disparities Through a Contextual Approach

The Relationship Between Education and Health: Reducing Disparities Through a Contextual Approach

Schooling, Skills, and Self-rated Health

Social determinants of health, data science, and decision-making: Forging a transdisciplinary synthesis

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