Partner selection and social capital in the status attainment process

Why is individual success so strongly affected by parental socioeconomic status? We argue that parental socioeconomic status affects the socioeconomic status of one's romantic partner, thereby partially determining one's own social capital and socioeconomic status. Censored-inflated structural equation models using data from the NEtherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (NELLS) and British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) confirm these relationships, while cross-lagged analyses suggest that they may be causal in nature. The strong tendency for people to have a romantic partner that reflects their socioeconomic origin shows how far the influence of the parental home stretches and why it does so.     

Self-rated health at the intersection of sexual identity and union status

There is a well-established relationship between union status and health within the general population, and growing evidence of an association between sexual identity and well-being. Yet, what is unknown is whether union status stratifies health outcomes across sexual identity categories. In order to elucidate this question, we analyzed nationally representative population-based data from the National Health Interview Surveys 2013–2014 (N = 53,135) to examine variation in self-rated health by sexual partnership status (i.e., by sexual identity across union status). We further test the role of socioeconomic status and gender in these associations. Results from logistic regression models show that union status stratifies self-rated health across gay, lesbian, and heterosexual populations, albeit in different ways for men and women. Socioeconomic status does not play a major role in accounting for these differences. Findings highlight the need for specific interventions with lesbian women, who appear to experience the most strident disadvantage across union status categories.     

The relationship between lifetime health trajectories and socioeconomic attainment in middle age

A large literature demonstrates the direct and indirect influence of health on socioeconomic attainment, and reveals the ways in which health and socioeconomic background simultaneously and dynamically affect opportunities for attainment and mobility. Despite an increasing understanding of the effects of health on social processes, research to date remains limited in its conceptualization and measurement of the temporal dimensions of health, especially in the presence of socioeconomic circumstances that covary with health over time. Guided by life course theory, we use data from the British National Child Development Study, an ongoing panel study of a cohort born in 1958, to examine the association between lifetime health trajectories and socioeconomic attainment in middle age. We apply finite mixture modeling to identify distinct trajectories of health that simultaneously account for timing, duration and stability. Moreover, we employ propensity score weighting models to account for the presence of time-varying socioeconomic factors in estimating the impact of health trajectories. We find that, when poor health is limited to the childhood years, the disadvantage in socioeconomic attainment relative to being continuously healthy is either insignificant or largely explained by time-varying socioeconomic confounders. The socioeconomic impact of continuously deteriorating health over the life course is more persistent, however. Our results suggest that accounting for the timing, duration and stability of poor health throughout both childhood and adulthood is important for understanding how health works to produce social stratification. In addition, the findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between confounding and mediating effects of time-varying socioeconomic circumstances.     

Foreign-born health integration during the transition to adulthood: The case of weight

Nativity differences in youths’ health in the United States are striking—the children of foreign-born parents often have healthier outcomes than those of native-born parents. However, very little is known about how immigrant-native differences evolve within the same individuals over time, or about life cycle aspects of the health-related integration of youth with migration backgrounds. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I examine nativity differences in trajectories of weight gain during adolescence and early adulthood, as well as the degree to which temporal patterns are stratified by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. I examine whether nativity differences converge, diverge or remain stable over time, and whether patterns are socially stratified within and across nativity groups. I find that first-generation adolescents begin at a lower weight than their third generation peers and gain weight at a significantly slower pace, resulting in meaningful differences by early adulthood. More complex examination of the relationship between nativity and weight gain reveals additional differences by ethnicity: the foreign-born advantage over time does not extend as strongly to Hispanic adolescents. The findings demonstrate how the health-related integration of foreign-born youth is tied to race/ethnicity and socioeconomic circumstances, and suggest the need to examine the ways in which social circumstances and health change together.     

Misconceived equity? Health care resources,contextual poverty,and child health disparities in Peru

Although many studies have examined determinants of child health, fewer have explored factors explaining regional disparities in child health outcomes. In the Peruvian context, we examined the relationship between regional disparities in child malnutrition and local variation in health resources (health care resources and the socioeconomic environment). Using the Peruvian 2007–2008 Continuous Demographic and Health Survey (N = 8020) and governmental administrative data, our analyses show that 1) only selected types of health care resources (medical professionals and outpatient visits) are related to child nutritional status, 2) local poverty predicts nutritional status net of household characteristics, and, most importantly, 3) a significant portion of regional differences in child malnutrition are explained by local poverty, whereas health care resources are not associated with regional disparities. These findings suggest that the local socioeconomic environment is a key determinant of both child health outcomes and regional disparities in these outcomes.     

Gendered tri-racial stratification and health disparities

Despite extensive evidence confirming racial and gender health disparities, little research considers how race theory might aid in understanding these patterns. Using the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES), this study fills this void by integrating two research areas—sociology of race and medical sociology—to assess the utility of Bonilla-Silva's tri-racial stratification perspective in predicting health patterns. More specifically, I address the following questions: is the tri-racial stratification thesis aligned with the health profiles of racial groups in the U.S.? Does the applicability of this perspective differ for women and men? Last, do the health patterns suggested by tri-racial stratification persist after adjusting for social factors (socioeconomic status and social support) often invoked to explain health disparities? Results indicate that the racial patterning of life-threatening conditions lend partial support for tri-racial stratification for women and men. Self-rated health findings yield counterintuitive patterns. Furthermore, social factors do not explain the majority of ethnic differences in health. Research and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Using geographically weighted regression for environmental justice analysis: Cumulative cancer risks from air toxics in Florida

Previous quantitative research on environmental justice has been limited by simplistic assumptions used to measure health risks and traditional regression techniques that fail to discern spatial variations in statistical relationships. We address these gaps through a case study that examines: (a) whether potential health risks from exposure to hazardous air pollutants in Florida are related to race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, and (b) how the significance of statistical associations between health risk and race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status vary across the state. This study integrates census tract level estimates of cumulative cancer risk compiled by the EPA with Census 2000 data and a spatial statistical technique known as geographically weighted regression that allows us to explore spatial variability in analytical results. Our findings indicate that while race and ethnicity are significantly related to cancer risks in Florida, conventional regression can hide important local variations in statistical relationships relevant to environmental justice analysis.     

Cognitive abilities and self-rated health: Is there a relationship? Is it growing? Does it explain disparities?

Although social epidemiologists have recently turned to the role of cognitive abilities in health, the ensuing debate has been largely speculative and numerous questions remain unanswered. Epidemiologists have speculated in three key areas: (i) whether cognitive abilities are associated with health; (ii) whether the association is growing; and (iii) whether cognitive abilities explain disparities. Using the cumulative 1974–2000 General Social Survey, this paper explores these questions using self-rated health as an outcome and a test of verbal ability as an indicator of cognitive abilities. On the one hand, the results suggest a significant and strictly monotonic association between verbal ability (with scores ranging from 0 to 10) and self-rated health. The association has been consistently strong since 1974; there is no evidence for a growing association. On the other hand, the results provide little to no evidence that verbal ability explains disparities. In multivariate models, the coefficients for income and education are reduced by only a small fraction with the introduction of controls for verbal ability (5 and 16%, respectively) and the relationship between verbal ability and self-rated health is, itself, very sensitive to controls for socioeconomic status. Furthermore, verbal ability cannot account for black–white differences in self-rated health: interaction-effect analyses indicate that, conditional on socioeconomic status, verbal ability has no discernable association with self-rated health among African Americans. Altogether, the results suggest that cognitive abilities are related to self-rated health, but also that cognitive abilities will do very little to explain disparities and may have benefits that are limited mostly—and sometimes entirely—to whites. The results are inconsistent with much of the previous speculation regarding cognitive abilities, but consistent with research on health’s “fundamental” causes and, more generally, with sociological research on the role of cognitive abilities in the process of stratification.     

Discovering pockets of complexity: Socioeconomic status,stress exposure,and the nuances of the health gradient

One of the most pervasive statements about stratification and health identifies the strong inverse relationship—or gradient—between socioeconomic status (SES) and poor health. We elaborate on the ways that the SES-based gradient in stress exposure contributes to nuances in the SES-health association. In analyses of the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, we find some evidence that the inverse association between SES and health outcomes is finely graded—but several ‘pockets of complexity’ emerge. First, education and income have different associations with health and well-being. Second, those associations depend on the outcome being assessed. Education is more influential for predicting anxiety and poor health than for depression or life dissatisfaction, while income is more influential for predicting depression and, to a lesser extent, life dissatisfaction. Third, different patterns of explanation or suppression reflect resource advantage or stress of higher status dynamics. Some impactful stressors that people encounter—especially job pressure and work-family conflict—are not neatly graded in ways that corroborate the conventional SES-health narrative. Instead, these mask the size of the overall health differences between lower versus higher SES groups. Our mapping of the SES gradient in stressors extends that story and complicates the conventional view of the association between SES and health/well-being.     

How do we assign ourselves social status? A cross-cultural test of the cognitive averaging principle

Subjective social status (SSS), or one’s perceived social standing, is linked robustly to mental and physical health and is thought to be determined in part by a cognitive average of one’s past, present and expected socioeconomic status. However, this averaging principle awaits a formal test. Further, cultures differ with regard to how they perceive and discount time. In this study, I draw upon cross-sectional data from the United States and Japan (2005 MIDUS non-Hispanic whites and 2008 MIDJA), which measured subjective status in terms of one’s perceived standing within a personally defined community. I compare equal and unequal cognitive averaging models for their goodness of fit relative to a traditional present-based model. Socioeconomic status is assessed broadly, in terms of past, present and expected overall work and financial situations. In the United States, averaging models do not fit the data consistently better than a present-based model of SSS. However, in Japan, averaging models do fit SSS consistently better. These fit conclusions are robust to controlling for negative affect.     

Perceived social standing among Asian immigrants in the US: Do reasons for immigration matter?

We investigate the association between a subjective measure of social status and the reasons for immigration among Asian immigrants in the US. We use data from the National Latino and Asian American Study to test several hypotheses about this association. Our analyses show the positive effect on perceived social standing of migrating for better education, the negative effect of migrating to seek employment, and the negative impact of refugee status. Migrating for family reunification can be associated with various circumstances, which lead to differing outcomes. The results suggest that the notion that immigrants arrive in the US with limited resources and few skills and move slowly up the socioeconomic ladder must be reassessed in light of the complex social context and factors such as ethnicity, gender, divergent immigration paths, and a range of associated circumstances.     

Breastfeeding,overweight status,and inflammation

Research documents a host of health benefits of breastfeeding for infants and children, including long-term health conditions arising from inflammation. Here, we provide new evidence about this association, focusing on the link between breastfeeding in infancy and inflammation in early adulthood. Our study is based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) which allows us investigate a potentially important mediating pathway – overweight status from early adolescence into young adulthood. Results from pathway analyses in a structural equation modeling framework indicate that, in addition to a direct pathway linking breastfeeding and inflammation, an indirect pathway through overweight status across adolescence into young adulthood partially explains the association between breastfeeding and inflammation. Overweight status, moreover, links breastfeeding to inflammation not only through proximal timing of overweight status, but also through an indirect cascading process of overweight status over the life course that is evident in adolescence. Overall, this study highlights the importance of considering breastfeeding, overweight status and inflammation as dynamic life course processes that contribute to development of health inequalities.     

Life course transitions in early adulthood and SES disparities in tobacco use

A huge literature has documented adult socioeconomic disparities in smoking but says less about how these disparities emerge over the life course. Building on findings that smoking among adolescents differs only modestly by parental SES, we utilize a life course perspective on social differentiation to help explain the widening disparities in smoking in young adulthood. Our theory suggests that achieved socioeconomic status and the nature and timing of adult role transitions affect age-based trajectories of smoking and widen disparities in adult smoking. The analyses use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which follows a representative national sample over four waves from ages 11–17 in 1994/1995 to 26–34 in 2007/2008. The results show divergent age trajectories in smoking by parental education and that achieved socioeconomic status and life course roles in young adulthood account in good part for differences in the age trajectories. The findings demonstrate the value of the life course perspective in understanding processes of increasing stratification in health behavior and health during the transition to adulthood.     

Wage change in the late career: A model for the outcomes of job sequences

This paper elaborates a model for the outcomes of job sequences and illustrates its utility by an empirical analysis of the determinants of wage change for men in their late careers. We argue that job sequences represent the basic components of careers and that a focus on these sequences is useful for explaining the determinants of socioeconomic inequality over the life cycle. Our model permits us to estimate the effects on wage change of a wide array of personal resources and measures of the opportunity structure. We further assess how these types of factors differentially affect wage change for various patterns of labor market behavior and for blacks vs whites. Our empirical analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Middle-Aged Men suggests the importance of patterns of job sequences for wage change and for the explanation of racial differentials in career advancement.     

Diffusion, cohort change, and social patterns of smoking()

In noting that common explanations of smoking cannot account for both its current inverse relationship with SES and the shift over time toward greater concentration among low SES groups, this paper presents an explanation based on diffusion and status distinctions. The explanation predicts that, as cigarette diffusion proceeds and fashions change, the social determinants of smoking will shift across cohorts, such that initially positive relationships between pre-adult components of socioeconomic status and smoking in early cohorts become negative in later cohorts. Tests using historical, cohort-linked aggregate data on cigarette diffusion, and individual-level data from the General Social Surveys covering the years from 1978 to 1994 and cohorts from 1889 to 1976 largely support the predictions. In comparing older to newer cohorts, the results show correspondence between the stage of cigarette diffusion and the direction and strength of the relationships of education, parental status, urban residence, and gender with cigarette smoking.     

Why does college education matter? Unveiling the contributions of selection factors

This study investigates the contributions of pre-college selection factors that may partially lead to the college degree – health link by using longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) cohort. Propensity score matching method finds that the effects of college degree on various health outcomes (self-rated health, physical component summary index, health limitations, CESD scale) are reduced by 51% on average (range: 37%–70%) in the matched sample. Among these observed factors, cognitive skill is the biggest confounder, followed by pre-college health and socioeconomic characteristics (marital aspiration, years of schooling, marriage, fertility, poverty status) and non-cognitive skills (e.g., self-esteem). Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control scale is not significantly associated with all four health measures. The effects of most indicators of family background (parental education, family stability, family size, religious background) on the health of adult children are not direct but through offspring's early adulthood health and socioeconomic status.     

Girls’ self-efficacy in the context of neighborhood gender stratification

Scholars have linked neighborhood characteristics to self-efficacy, but few have considered how gender factors into this association. We integrate literature on neighborhoods, gender stratification, and self-efficacy to examine the association between women's relative resources among neighborhood residents and adolescents' self-efficacy. We hypothesize that girls report more self-efficacy when they reside in neighborhoods where women have more socioeconomic resources relative to men. We test this hypothesis using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and the 1990 Census. Results from multilevel regression models with gender-interacted effects indicate the neighborhood level of women's relative resources was not associated with boys' self-efficacy. However, girls reported higher self-efficacy when women's relative resources in their neighborhoods were greater. This association persisted after including potential individual- and neighborhood-level confounding variables. Our study underscores the importance of attending to gendered processes when understanding how neighborhoods impact youth.     

Personal networks of prisoners prior to incarceration: A comparison with the general Dutch population

This study examines inmates’ core discussion network prior to their incarceration. The core discussion network consists of the immediate social circle of relatively strong ties. The aims of the study are twofold: (1) to describe inmates’ core discussion network prior to their incarceration in terms of network structure, relationship quality and embedded socioeconomic resources; (2) to compare inmates’ core discussion network with the core discussion network of the general Dutch population. Data are analyzed from the Prison Project (n = 1909) and the Survey of the Social Networks of the Dutch (n = 394). Compared with the general Dutch population, prior to incarceration, prisoners generally have a core discussion network that is similar to or even better with respect to network structure and relationship quality. However, prisoners’ core discussion network members seem to lack socioeconomic resources.     

Prestige versus socioeconomic status in the attainment processes of American men and women

This paper demonstrates the consequences to the researcher of choosing to analyze social mobility data with a prestige scale rather than with a socioeconomic index. First, the low intergenerational correlations reported for the International Prestige Scale are rejected when they are shown to be compatible with inadequate models of the processes of status inheritance. Second, the Duncan socioeconomic index is shown to be the preferred measure of status transmission in that it suffers from less random error than does the International Prestige Scale, particularly among men. Third, the occupational attainment processes of American men and women are described with socioeconomic scoring, and these findings are contrasted with those which obtain with prestige coding.     

Status inconsistency in groups: How discrepancies between instrumental and expressive status result in symptoms of stress

This study examines whether a mismatch between the positions that individuals hold in different status hierarchies results in symptoms of stress. Prior research has focused on inconsistencies between socioeconomic status dimensions (e.g., education and income) and did not find a significant relation between status inconsistency and stress. In this paper, we build on research on role differentiation and propose to study the effect of inconsistencies between instrumental status and expressive status in group contexts. We hypothesize that people with an inconsistency between these status dimensions experience feelings of uncertainty and frustration in their interactions with others and this manifests in stress-related symptoms. We test this hypothesis with data collected in a medium-sized Dutch childcare organization (N = 93). Polynomial regression analysis, visualized in response surface plots, suggests that status inconsistent employees report higher levels of stress.