The Relationship between Lifetime Health Trajectories and Socioeconomic Attainment in Middle Age

• In Event: 393 - Section on Children and Youth Paper Session. Pre and Post-Natal Influences on Children

Abstract

A large literature demonstrates the influence of health on socioeconomic attainment, and how health and socioeconomic background simultaneously and dynamically affect opportunities for attainment and mobility. Despite an increasing understanding of the effects of health on social processes, existing research offers little insight into how to appropriately conceptualize and measure the effects of time-dependent exposures to health and socioeconomic circumstances over the life course. Using data from the British National Child Development Study, an ongoing panel study of a cohort born in 1958, we examine the association between lifetime health trajectories and socioeconomic attainment in middle age. We apply finite mixture modeling to identify distinct trajectories of health status and employ propensity score weighting models to account for the presence of time-varying socioeconomic factors in estimating the impact of health trajectories. We find that the impact of childhood health status on mid-adulthood outcomes is contingent on adulthood health status. Those who experience deteriorating health during childhood, but improvements in health during adulthood, fare no differently in their likelihood of high occupational attainment than those who remain continuously healthy throughout childhood and adulthood. In contrast, health trajectories have a stronger impact when we consider duration effects. Those who experience continuously deteriorating health throughout childhood and adulthood experience poorer health and lower occupational attainment than their peers in more stably strong, or sporadically poor, health. Our results suggest that accounting for cumulative exposure to poor health throughout both childhood and adulthood is important for understanding how health works to produce social stratification.

Authors

• Dohoon Lee, New York University

• Margot Jackson, Brown University