Towards Understanding Young Adults’ Socioeconomic Circumstances in Health Inequality Research: Smoking as a Case Example

• In Event: 376 - Section on Sociology of Population. Health and Inequality across the Life Course

Abstract

Young adults (18-25) are experiencing unique transitions through family, school and work institutions that make it difficult to capture their socioeconomic circumstances. There is, accordingly, a dearth of guidelines on their operationalization. In response, we investigate how young adults’ family characteristics, individual resources, and transitions towards adulthood are imbricated in producing health inequalities, and illustrate this using smoking as an example. We use data from the Interdisciplinary Study of Inequalities in Smoking that recruited 2,093 young adults (18-25) in Montreal, Canada in 2011-2012. We examine participants’ education and fifteen parental, individual and transition stage variables. We balance the unequal probability of “exposure” to individual predictors by parental covariates; we then examine individual predictors’ association with smoking status and effect modification by age and education in weighted regression models. In addition to education, four characteristics were associated with smoking: experiencing financial difficulties, having a higher personal income, not studying and not living with children. The associations of student status and personal income were, however, modified by age and education: both had a much stronger association with smoking among younger adults and those who only completed high school. This study supports the benefits of integrating multiple dimensions of young adults’ socioeconomic circumstances and taking into account their interplay and changing influence over time in health inequality research.

Authors

• Thierry Gagné, Université de Montréal

• Katherine L. Frohlich, Université de Montréal