Feeling Unequal: Emotional Health in the Reproduction of Social Class

• In Event: 411 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Health Disparities.

Abstract

An influential new literature suggests that socio-emotional traits have a causal effect on adult socio-economic status. Yet social theory questions the assumption that poor emotional health, especially that externalized in problem behavior, is independent of social class origins. The British Cohort Study uniquely enables analysis of the role in social mobility of validated measures of subjective emotional distress, low self-esteem and low self-efficacy, as well as parent and teacher-rated self-control and behavior problems. Together, childhood emotional health accounts for up to 30% of the ordinal intergenerational association between parent and child social class. Multinomial logistic models find that subjective low self-efficacy and self-esteem, as well as externalized problem behaviors, substantially decrease the probability of attaining or maintaining a higher social class. The negative effect of poor emotional health on upward mobility, however, is over 2 times the magnitude of its positive effect on downward mobility. The results indicate that emotional health works more to reproduce, than to disrupt, social class inequality.

Author

• Sophie Clare Moullin, Princeton University