Cross-Coupling Cohort and Family in the Production of Health Inequality

• In Event: Aging and the Life Course Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 6: Family Relationships and Dynamics

Abstract

While prior literature has established that cohorts face distinct macro-level exposures and that early-life family origins generate durable health inequality, there are still insufficient findings on how these processes jointly reorganize inequality. I argue that cohort stratification and intergenerational reproduction jointly shape both between-cohort differences in mean health and within-cohort disparity/dispersion, and that cohort conditions alter the conversion of family resources into health advantage. Using longitudinal PSID data, I model self-rated health as an age trajectory in a longitudinal hierarchical age–period–cohort (HAPC) framework and link it to a variance-function regression (VFR) that estimates conditional dispersion as a function of age, cohort, and early-life family mechanisms (resources, structure, and relations). Preliminary results reject an “independent pathways” account: cohort-linked dispersion persists net of family origins, and cohort-by-family interactions indicate cohort-contingent reproduction. Overall, findings suggest that cohort stratification reshapes health inequality by shifting mean health across generations and reorganizing within-cohort heterogeneity through cohort-patterned family composition and cohort-varying returns to family resources.

Author

• Xin Zhao, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill