Socioeconomic Status and Health

Farmers' mental health: A longitudinal sibling comparison – the HUNT study, Norway

“…Having a health problem may cause downward social mobility, a process known as social drift (20). To reduce bias due to reverse causation, we used an approach similar to the intention-to-treat principle in randomized controlled trials in the sibling study.…”

“…Occupation and education are both ways of measuring socioeconomic status (20), and consequently we did not adjust for education in the comparison between farmers and other occupational groups. When comparing farmers with their siblings, education and birth order could have been confounders, and we therefore adjusted for them in the analyses.…”

Socio-economic inequalities in tobacco-related diseases in Portugal: an ecological approach

“…17 According to Glymour et al, 'socioeconomic status is typically characterized along three dimensions: education, employment, and money' (page 17). 20 Education is related to future success (and thus access to economic resources and prestige), and to capacity to learning and gathering information. Occupation signals the working environment (and thus exposure to risks, including psychosocial ones), and also the income and prestige.…”

The Counterfactual Implications of Fundamental Cause Theory

“…Both race [41••] and socioeconomic status [5••, 40••] have been postulated as fundamental causes. High-SES individuals and privileged racial groups have access to a variety of flexible material and social resources (knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections) that enable them to maintain lower risks of death and disease, irrespective of the underlying etiology driving these outcomes [42]. As noted by Phelan, Link, and Tehranifar [40••], (pS29) "[i]t is their capacity to be used flexibly by individuals and groups that places [these] resources at the center of fundamental cause theory."…”

“…Additionally, one noted limitation is that fundamental cause theory does not imply anything specific about the linkages between flexible resources [42]. Thus, based on fundamental cause theory alone, one could not determine whether reducing a socioeconomic health disparity would best be accomplished by modifying resources linked to, for example, money, prestige, or knowledge.…”