Predicting self-rated mental and physical health: the contributions of subjective socioeconomic status and personal relative deprivation.

William J Matthews,Mitchell J Callan,Hyunji Kim

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01415

William J Matthews, Mitchell J Callan + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01415

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Abstract

Lower subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) and higher personal relative deprivation (PRD) relate to poorer health. Both constructs concern people's perceived relative social position, but they differ in their emphasis on the reference groups people use to determine their comparative disadvantage (national population vs. similar others) and the importance of resentment that may arise from such adverse comparisons. We investigated the relative utility of SSS and PRD as predictors of self-rated physical and mental health (e.g., self-rated health, stress, health complaints). Across six studies, self-rated physical and mental health were on the whole better predicted by measures of PRD than by SSS while controlling for objective socioeconomic status (SES), with SSS rarely contributing unique variance over and above PRD and SES. Studies 4–6 discount the possibility that the superiority of PRD over SSS in predicting health is due to psychometric differences (e.g., reliability) or response biases between the measures.

Highlights

Extensive epidemiological research has shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is a key determinant of public health
A similar pattern of correlations emerged for Personal Relative Deprivation Scale (PRDS), such that, with the exception of physical health impairment, higher personal relative deprivation (PRD) significantly related to worse health outcomes
General dominance weights (GDW; see Table 3) represent the average incremental contribution each predictor makes across all possible submodels; they always sum to the overall model R2 for a given criterion, which allows for a rank-ordering of the average contribution of each predictor to a criterion by itself and when taking all other predictors into account

Summary

Introduction

Extensive epidemiological research has shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is a key determinant of public health. Research has compellingly demonstrated that subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) is an important predictor of health (e.g., Adler et al, 2000; Operario et al, 2004; SinghManoux et al, 2005; for recent reviews, see Euteneuer, 2014; Quon and McGrath, 2014). Over and above indicators of objective SES (e.g., income, education), lower SSS has been shown to predict, for example, poorer self-rated health (Operario et al, 2004), higher risk of strokes (Avendano et al, 2006), and lower quality of sleep (Adler et al, 2000). Lower SSS is correlated with poorer mental health outcomes, such as higher perceived stress (Senn et al, 2014) and depression (Kraus et al, 2013)

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