Subjective social status and health: A meta-analysis of community and society ladders.

Abstract

Objective: To derive a robust estimate of the relation between health and subjective status in society versus subjective status in one's community, and to identify moderators of these effects, using metaanalysis. Method: Thirty-eight independent studies, which included both subjective status ladders and collectively provided data from 142,836 participants, met criteria for inclusion. Information on sample characteristics (e.g., age, gender, continent), methodological factors (e.g., scale type, methodological quality), and statistical factors (e.g., model type, inclusion of objective socioeconomic status covariates) were extracted from each study. Random-effects meta-analysis was used to aggregate data across studies. Results: Both the community ladder and the society ladder yielded small but statistically significant associations with health behavior (r ϭ .06 and r ϭ .06), mental health (r ϭ .13 and r ϭ .11), physical health (r ϭ .05 and r ϭ .04), and self-rated health (r ϭ .08 and r ϭ .09) that were comparable in size and were qualified in a similar way by the type of health outcome, sample age, continent, and methodological quality. Additionally, community and society ladders remained significantly associated with health both when considered simultaneously and following the inclusion of objective socioeconomic status covariates. Conclusions: This meta-analysis is the first to establish a unique association of the community ladder with health. It also supports social comparison theories highlighting the importance of comparisons with proximal others and may promote greater use of the community ladder in future research.

Relative wealth, subjective social status, and their associations with depression: Cross-sectional, population-based study in rural Uganda

“…These study designs, however, do not yield information about the relative deprivation hypothesis. Depression has also been linked to subjective social status (Hamad et al, 2008), even after adjusting for education, income, and/or occupation (Franzini & Fernandez-Esquer, 2006; Scott et al, 2014; Singh-Manoux et al, 2003; Zell, Strickhouser, & Krizan, 2018). Compared with absolute measures of SES, subjective social status has been found to better correlate with depression (Hamad et al, 2008) and other health outcomes (Ahlborg, Svedberg, Nyholm, Morgan, & Nygren, 2017; Demakakos, Biddulph, de Oliveira, Tsakos, & Marmot, 2018; Euteneuer, 2014; Singh-Manoux et al, 2005).…”

Profiles of Adolescent Identity at the Intersection of Ethnic/Racial Identity, American Identity, and Subjective Social Status

“…An intersectional perspective allows for the unique discovery of configurations of multiple marginalization and/or privilege statuses (Bauer, 2014;Evans et al, 2018;Wolff et al, 2010). Previously, the concept of identity intersectionality has often been operationalized with objective measures of ethnicity/race and socioeconomic status (Wolff et al, 2010;Gong et al, 2012;Goodman et al, 2015), and less research has focused on subjective perceptions of identity intersectionality, despite another line of research suggesting the importance of subjective perceptions of one's place in a society (Deaux, 1996;Zell et al, 2018).…”

“…It includes the individual's current social standing, their background, and their perception of the opportunities in their future, which are shaped by the socioeconomic, educational, and ethnic/racial elements of their background (Singh-Manoux et al, 2003). SSS is a well-established predictor of both mental and physical health (Zell et al, 2018), wherein individuals reporting higher SSS are found to be healthier than those who report lower SSS (Quon and McGrath, 2014). Not only does the association between SSS and health remain after controlling for traditional measures of socioeconomic status (Cundiff and Matthews, 2017), SSS has been found to be more strongly related to self-rated health, chronic stress, sleep latency, and other physical health and psychological outcomes, such as obesity, depression, and subjective well-being, than objective status (Adler et al, 2000;Singh-Manoux et al, 2005).…”

Which socio-economic comparison groups do individuals choose and why?

“…Further, it has been shown that in Eastern European and Eurasian societies, those men who compared themselves with their parents and their own families before the start of the post-communist transition were less likely to report good health . A recent meta-analysis in health psychology suggests that having low status in comparison to immediate others may manifest in negative health-related behaviours, such as smoking, and worse physical health, such as cardiovascular morbidity and diabetes (Zell et al 2018).…”