Abstract
Using a national dataset, this study investigates the inequalities in physical functional status, depressive symptoms, and self-rated health among groups of people with different socioeconomic status (SES) through the use of multilevel regression models. The results reveal that as age increases, differences in physical functional status among people with different SES expand and no significant differences in depressive symptoms are found. However, general conclusions on the trend of differences in self-rated health cannot be made. In wealthy regions, the differences in the three health indicators among people with different SES shrink, but these differences expand in poor regions. Finally, this study advocates that the emphasis of the structural reform of medical treatment and public health should be elderly with low SES who resides in poor regions.
Highlights
Due to its profound intrinsic value, health is usually regarded as an important criterion to evaluate the development of a society
We find that model 7 exhibits significant improvement on model 6 in terms of depressive symptoms and self-rated health, but model 7 does not show significant improvement on the corresponding model 6 (P = 0.121) with regard to physical functional status, though the significance level is close to 0.1, which implies some degrees of improvement
Compared to previous research, the samples used in the present study include the middle-aged group between 45 to years old and a fairly number of elderly people over so that we could evaluate the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) on health at different age periods
Summary
Due to its profound intrinsic value, health is usually regarded as an important criterion to evaluate the development of a society. Health differences among different groups of people are an objective reality. Health inequality is an important part of social inequality and presents a serious challenge (Guo and Xie 2009) in both wealthy and impoverished countries, becoming a major research topic in the social sciences over the past 20 or 30 years. The majority of previous research indicates significant associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and health (e.g., Feinstein 1993; Mackenbach et al 1997; Wang 2011), the conclusions were based primarily on adult samples, and no consensus for the elderly group has been reached. The SES-health relationship may present different forms between different countries or areas. Does the difference in health among groups of people with different SES expand or shrink during the elderly stage? Does the difference in health among groups of people with different SES expand or shrink during the elderly stage? Is there a significant difference in the SES-health relationship among different regions, that is, does the health difference among groups of people with different SES get larger or smaller as the area becomes wealthier?
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