Wealth and Wisdom Wield Wellness? Socioeconomic Position, National Context, and Self-Rated Health in Global Perspective

• In Event: Medical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 15. Global Health

Abstract

Building on the extant literature, the present study examines socioeconomic inequalities in self-rated health using data from the most recent wave of the World Values Survey, encompassing 66 countries and the majority of the world’s population. The study pursues three interrelated objectives. First, we provide an up-to-date and globally comprehensive assessment of the associations between two core indicators of socioeconomic position—education and income—and self-rated health using internationally harmonized measures. Guided by theories emphasizing the persistence of individual-level gradients, we assess whether these associations remain robust across diverse national contexts. Second, we explicitly examine cross-national heterogeneity in the magnitude and significance of education–health and income–health relationships through country-specific analyses. This approach allows us to evaluate whether income and education exhibit similar degrees of consistency across countries, or whether one dimension of socioeconomic position emerges as a more stable predictor of SRH in comparative perspective. Third, we investigate the extent to which commonly used national-level characteristics—such as economic development and income inequality—are associated with individual SRH or moderate individual-level socioeconomic gradients. By employing both classical and Bayesian multilevel modeling strategies and by contrasting results from a highly heterogeneous global sample with those from a more institutionally homogeneous subset of Western industrialized countries, we directly address longstanding methodological concerns in comparative health inequality research. The contribution of this study lies in clarifying the relative explanatory power of individual versus national determinants of self-rated health in large-scale comparative analysis. In line with, but not centered on, influential comparative syntheses in the field, our findings demonstrate that individual-level socioeconomic position—particularly income—exhibits far greater consistency and robustness in predicting SRH than do commonly invoked national-level indicators.

Authors

• Jun Xu, University of Macau

• Fang Gong, Ball State University

• Wei Zhao, University of California-Riverside