Abstract
The contemporaneous association between higher socioeconomic position and better health is well established. Life course research has also demonstrated a lasting effect of childhood socioeconomic conditions on adult health and well-being. Yet, little is known about the separate health effects of intergenerational mobility-moving into a different socioeconomic position than one's parents-among early adults in the United States. Most studies on the health implications of mobility rely on cross-sectional datasets, which makes it impossible to differentiate between health selection and social causation effects. In addition, understanding the effects of social mobility on health at a relatively young age has been hampered by the paucity of health measures that reliably predict disease onset. Analysing 4,713 respondents aged 25 to 32 from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health's Waves I and IV, we use diagonal reference models to separately identify the effects of socioeconomic origin and destination, as well as social mobility on allostatic load among individuals in the United States. Using a combined measure of educational and occupational attainment, and accounting for individuals' initial health, we demonstrate that in addition to health gradient among the socially immobile, individuals' socioeconomic origin and destination are equally important for multi-system physiological dysregulation. Short-range upward mobility also has a positive and significant association with health. After mitigating health selection concerns in our observational data, this effect is observed only among those reporting poor health before experiencing social mobility. Our findings move towards the reconciliation of two theoretical perspectives, confirming the positive effect of upward mobility as predicted by the "rags to riches" perspective, while not contradicting potential costs associated with more extensive upward mobility experiences as predicted by the dissociative thesis.
Highlights
Socioeconomic position is a fundamental cause of health disparities [1]
Out of available measures of socioeconomic position in Add Health, we focused on individuals’ and their parents’ educational and occupational attainment which aligns with prior social stratification research in the United States [73]
A similar but inverse pattern can be observed for those who experienced downward mobility. These associations could be partially explained by the fact that the upwardly mobile groups do not include those who ended up in the bottom quintile, while downwardly mobile groups do not include those who ended up in the highest quintile. The latter suggests that upwardly and downwardly mobile individuals differ by their social origin and destination positions and to disentangle these position effects from social mobility effects, we employed the above-described statistical approach—diagonal reference models (DRM)
Summary
Socioeconomic position is a fundamental cause of health disparities [1]. Those occupying higher rungs on the socioeconomic ladder tend to experience lower rates of morbidity and mortality compared to those placed lower in the social hierarchy [2,3]. An unresolved question in social stratification and social epidemiological research is whether the movement between origin and destination socioeconomic positions, per se, influences health net of origin and destination effects. While Sobel’s diagonal reference models overcome this methodological limitation [15], few studies have utilized this statistical approach when investigating the health effects of social mobility, in the North American context. This represents an important gap in the literature given renewed scholarly interest in intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantages and declining social mobility in the United States [16,17,18]
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