Contextual or Compositional Effects? Income Inequality, Socioeconomic Status, and Self-Rated Health in 76 Countries

• In Event: 3247 - Open Topic on Sociology of Development

Abstract

Evidence suggests that macro-level inequality’s impact on an individual’s health might represent a contextual (i.e., ecological) rather than a compositional (i.e., related to individual resources) effect. To test this relationship, previous works subject the income inequality-health hypothesis to multi-level models that attempt to untangle the relationships between income inequality, individual income, and poverty. However, results provide mixed support for an association between income inequality and individual-level health. This paper extends on the previous literature by untangling the effects of macro-level income inequality and individual-level resources on self-rated health using a broader sample of countries than previous works. Thus, it brings to bear a cross-national, comparative perspective on the macro-micro link between income inequality and health. It also considers the effects of an additional individual-level resource not often explored in previous works, subjective social class. Using self-rated health and individual-level resources data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and improved income inequality data from the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID), I estimate two-way fixed effects regressions that account for macro- and micro-factors for 189,586 individuals nested within 76 countries. Through interactions, I test the null hypothesis that income inequality does not moderate the association between elements of socioeconomic status and self-rated health. Results indicate that subjective social class plays an important role in self-rated health beyond household income and educational attainment. This finding suggests that subjective social class might capture distinct mechanisms through which SES impacts health. However, country-level income inequality appears to amplify the link between educational attainment and self-rated health for highly-educated individuals, which provides some support for neo-materialist mechanisms rather than the “pollution” pathways for income inequality and health.

Author

• Michaela Kathleen Curran, University of California-Riverside