Working Paper Series, Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University
No 5/2008:
"Stratification and Mortality - A Comparison of Education, Class, Status and Income"
Jenny Torssander ()
and Robert Erikson ()
Abstract: In many analyses of social inequality in health, different
dimensions of social stratification have been used more or less
interchangeably as measures of the individual’s general social standing.
This procedure, however, has been questioned in previous studies, most of
them comparing education, class and/or income. In the present article, the
importance of education and income as well as two aspects of occupation –
class and status – are examined. The results are based on register data and
refer to all Swedish employees in the age range 35-59 years. There are
clear gradients in total death risk for all socioeconomic factors except
for income from work among women. The size of the independent effects of
education, class, status and income differ between men and women. For both
sexes, there are clear net associations between education and mortality.
Class and income show independent effects on mortality only for men and
status shows an independent effect only for women. While different
stratification dimensions – education, social class, income, status – all
can be used to show a “social gradient” with mortality, each of them seems
to have a specific effect in addition to the general effect related to the
stratification of society for either men or women.
Keywords: -; (follow links to similar papers)
25 pages, October 7, 2008
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