Health and Status Attainment

Abstract

The issue of whether health influences mobility and status attainment has tended to be neglected in the main traditions of social mobility research. Health inequality research, however, indicates that health strongly affects transitions into and out of employment, but that the occupational mobility of the steadily employed is practically unaffected by health. This latter finding is surprising, because a plausible conjecture is that health variations influence occupational achievement also among those in continuous working careers. In this article I investigate the topic in a sample of Norwegian men born in 1946 who have been steadily employed over the course of three decades ( n= 330). Using ordinary least squares regression, I analyse whether health is associated with subsequent changes in occupational prestige, managerial position and income change. The results indicate that health variations have no impact on occupational trajectories during young adulthood. After age 40, however, significant health effects are revealed in relation to attainment of managerial position and income change, but not to changes in occupational prestige. This suggests that occupational trajectories are health-selective to some extent even among men in continuous working careers, but that these tendencies first emerge in mid-life when health has become more differentiated, and health effects are constrained by how occupational careers are typically structured in present-day societies.