Intergenerational social mobility and self-rated health in Canada

Abstract

A growing body of research seeks to reveal the health effects of ‘falling from grace’ or ‘rising from rags,’ i.e., experiencing downward or upward mobility relative to one's family socioeconomic background. In this study, we mobilized a unique dataset, the 2012 Longitudinal and International Study of Adults linked to historical income data from the Canada Revenue Agency, to investigate associations between both educational and income mobility and self-rated health in a national sample of approximately 2500 women and 2300 men aged 25 to 50. Compared to educational immobility, extreme downward educational mobility corresponded to elevated odds of reporting good/fair/poor health among women (OR = 3.053; 95% CI = 0.991 … 9.393). Compared to income immobility, downward income mobility in general (OR = 1.533; 95% CI = 1.115 … 2.106) and extreme downward income mobility in particular (OR = 2.389; 95% CI = 1.481 … 3.854) both corresponded to elevated odds of reporting good/fair/poor health among women. Among men, extreme upward income mobility (OR = 0.674; 95% CI = 0.463 … 0.984) corresponded to reduced odds of reporting good/fair/poor health and extreme downward income mobility (OR = 2.237; 95% CI = 1.157 … 4.323) corresponded to elevated odds of reporting good/fair/poor health, compared to men with immobile incomes. In summary, upward income mobility was beneficial for men's self-rated health, downward educational mobility was detrimental to the self-rated health of women, and downward income mobility was detrimental to the self-rated health of both women and men in this Canadian study.