Stress perception: A pathway from socio-economic status to health

Abstract

Stress research is an important area in medical sociology. Psychosocial stress accounts for negative health outcomes across various physiological systems and can have far-reaching consequences for the organism’s health. Socio-economic status, in its turn, influences the likelihood of stress exposure and how its consequences will be addressed. All in all, there is ample systematic evidence in support of complex associations between socio-economic status, stress and health outcomes. Following a series of discoveries in the biomedical sphere, our understanding of stress became considerably more complex, and the causal mechanisms of this process have become more prominent in research literature over the last few decades. Integration of this new data from biology, genetics and medicine into sociological, anthropological and socio-epidemiological research of stress has changed not only how this research niche conceptualizes and measures stress but also how the role that the society and social structures play in patterned distribution of disease, aging and mortality is understood. Although the link between stress and health is well studied, the mechanisms linking socio-economic status, the stress process and health outcomes have received rather less attention. An online quantitative study (n = 902) carried out in Kyiv during 2020–2021 focused on the question of the SES–stress link in the context of health outcomes. Specifically, the study tested the following propositions: (a) stress affects self-rated health and wellness of individuals; (b) current SES affects individual self-rated health and wellness; (c) individuals from low SES categories face higher current perceived stress levels compared to individuals from higher SES categories; (d) individuals who report having low SES in childhood have higher perceived stress levels during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to their counterparts whose familial socio-economic status was higher when they were children; and (e) having chronic conditions exacerbates individual stress levels.