Health challenges
Does subjective social status predict health and change in health status better than objective status?
It’s all in our head: health status linked to subjective socioeconomic status
Authors:
A. Singh-Manoux; M.G. Marmot; N.E. Adler
Publisher:
American Psychosomatic Society, 2005
Is a persons’ health status better predicted by their subjective or objective socioeconomic status? This article examines this question and finds that:
- when analysed independently, both subjective and objective measures of socioeconomic status were significantly associated with health outcomes and with decline in health status over time
- when analysed simultaneously, subjective measures offer a better association to health and changes in health that objective measures
- subjective socioeconomic status is a more precise measure of social position
- the results support the idea that hierarchical rank influence health through direct and indirect mechanisms
- the results could be a product of common method variance, where both subjective socioeconomic status and health ratings have no meaningful relationship to each other, rather they are affected by a common underlying variable
