Abstract
We link survey data on Danish people’s perceived income positions and fairness views on inequality within various reference groups to administrative records on their reference groups, income ...histories, and life events. People are, on average, well-informed about the income levels of their reference groups. Yet, lower-ranked respondents in all groups tend to overestimate their own position among others because they believe others’ incomes are lower than they actually are, whereas the opposite holds true for higher-ranked respondents. Misperceptions of positions in reference groups relate to proximity to other individuals, transparency norms, and visible signals of income. People view inequalities within their co-workers and education groups as significantly more unfair than overall inequality, yet underestimate inequality the most exactly within these groups. Views on the fairness of inequalities are strongly correlated with an individual’s current position, move with shocks like unemployment or promotions, and change when experimentally informing people about their actual positions. However, the higher perceived unfairness of income differences within co-workers and education groups stays unchanged. The theoretical framework shows that this can have important implications for redistribution policy.
In the United States, awareness is increasing that medical care alone cannot adequately improve health overall or reduce health disparities without also addressing where and how people live. A ...critical mass of relevant knowledge has accumulated, documenting associations, exploring pathways and biological mechanisms, and providing a previously unavailable scientific foundation for appreciating the role of social factors in health. We review current knowledge about health effects of social (including economic) factors, knowledge gaps, and research priorities, focusing on upstream social determinants-including economic resources, education, and racial discrimination-that fundamentally shape the downstream determinants, such as behaviors, targeted by most interventions. Research priorities include measuring social factors better, monitoring social factors and health relative to policies, examining health effects of social factors across lifetimes and generations, incrementally elucidating pathways through knowledge linkage, testing multidimensional interventions, and addressing political will as a key barrier to translating knowledge into action.
Early-life psychosocial stress primes a number of health risk behaviors, and contributes to the development of various mental and somatic disorders in adulthood. It has been reported that adverse ...childhood experiences (ACEs) and low socioeconomic status (SES) might be associated with allostatic load (AL) in adulthood. In turn, elevated AL index has been found to predict a number of unfavorable health outcomes. Therefore, we aimed to perform a systematic review of studies investigating the association of ACEs and childhood SES with AL in adult populations. Independent online searches covered the publication period up to 20th Jun 2021. A total of 27 studies were included in qualitative synthesis. The majority of eligible studies showed that ACEs (14 out of 19 studies recording ACEs, 73.7%) and low childhood SES (11 out of 12 studies recording childhood SES, 91.7%) are associated with elevated AL in adults. However, several processes were found to mediate or moderate this association. These include educational attainments, social support, health behaviors, adult stress, post-traumatic stress disorder, coping strategies and aging. Moreover, a substantial methodological heterogeneity of approaches to calculating the AL index was observed. Apart from reports from overlapping samples, none of eligible studies used the same set of biomarkers. Findings from this systematic review imply that early-life psychosocial stress might have a lasting impact on biological dysregulations captured by the AL index. Future studies need to explore whether the association between early-life stress and the AL index accounts for the development of specific health outcomes.
•Early-life stress is related to elevated allostatic load (AL) indices in adulthood.•Coping strategies and age were reported to moderate this association.•Education, social support, health behaviors, stress and PTSD may act as mediators.•Mediators and moderators may serve as targets for interventions aimed to reduce AL.•Reported associations should be explored in association with health outcomes.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
When an organization implements practices within the context of new work, individual actors must translate and adapt them to their local context. These change agents thereby often encounter the ...paradox of being both translators and targets of change. However, how they react to such a situation, which strategies they use, and whether their reactions legitimize the implementation of new work attempts in their organization have hardly been considered so far. We filled this gap by studying middle managers translating organizational change toward more self-managing structures and other procedures that empower employees. At the same time, however, these changes make the institution of middle management redundant. Findings of a qualitative 32-month single-case study at a medium-sized firm showed that middle managers reacted with five distinct reactions. Informed by translation and institutional theory, we showed that middle managers’ intraorganizational social positions determined their reactions over time, making them either victims or phoenixes of the change process toward new forms of work. Our findings contribute to contemporary research on the implementation of self-managing organizations and help to better understand how such concepts are translated within an organization.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Health literacy concerns the ability of citizens to meet the complex demands of health in modern society. Data on the distribution of health literacy in general populations and how health literacy ...impacts health behavior and general health remains scarce. The present study aims to investigate the prevalence of health literacy levels and associations of health literacy with socioeconomic position, health risk behavior, and health status at a population level.
A nationwide cross-sectional survey linked to administrative registry data was applied to a randomly selected sample of 15,728 Danish individuals aged ≥25 years. By the short form HLS-EU-Q16 health literacy was measured for the domains of healthcare, disease prevention, and health promotion. Adjusted multinomial logistic regression analyses were used to estimate associations of health literacy with demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, health risk behavior (physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption, body weight), and health status (sickness benefits, self-assessed health).
Overall, 9007 (57.3%) individuals responded to the survey. Nearly 4 in 10 respondents faced difficulties in accessing, understanding, appraising, and applying health information. Notably, 8.18% presented with inadequate health literacy and 30.94% with problematic health literacy. Adjusted for potential confounders, regression analyses showed that males, younger individuals, immigrants, individuals with basic education or income below the national average, and individuals receiving social benefits had substantially higher odds of inadequate health literacy. Among health behavior factors (smoking, high alcohol consumption, and inactivity), only physical behavior sedentary: OR: 2.31 (95% CI: 1.81; 2.95) was associated with inadequate health literacy in the adjusted models. The long-term health risk indicator body-weight showed that individuals with obesity OR: 1.78 (95% CI: 1.39; 2.28) had significantly higher odds of lower health literacy scores. Poor self-assessed health OR: 4.03 (95% CI: 3.26; 5.00) and payments of sickness absence compensation benefits OR: 1.74 (95% CI: 1.35; 2.23) were associated with lower health literacy scores.
Despite a relatively highly educated population, the prevalence of inadequate health literacy is high. Inadequate health literacy is strongly associated with a low socioeconomic position, poor health status, inactivity, and overweight, but to a lesser extent with health behavior factors such as smoking and high alcohol consumption.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We examine the micro-foundations of field-level organizational change by analyzing the role of social skill and social position in individuals. Our core argument is that differences in an ...individual's social skill and in their social position produce different degrees of reflexivity or awareness of existing social arrangements. We demonstrate how the interaction of social skill and social position produce distinct types or categories of reflexivity, each of which contributes to institutional stability or change.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
Despite being challenged in recent years, the hypothesis that individuals of higher socioeconomic status (SES) are more physically active than their lower SES counterparts is generally considered a ...fact. Recent reviews, however, have suggested that differences across groups might be related to which physical activity (PA) domains have been investigated. In the present review, searches for relevant studies were performed in the MEDLINE, ISI Web of Knowledge and SPORTDiscus databases. Search terms included "socioeconomic", "socio-economic", "socio economic" and "social class" to meet all variations of the variable "socioeconomic status" in combination with the term "physical activity". Studies were included when applying the dimensions of intensity, frequency, type/mode, and duration in measuring PA. Fifty-six studies were included and were subsequently split into four PA domains: transport PA (TPA), occupational PA (OPA), housing PA (HPA) and leisure time PA (LTPA). It turned out that the positive relationship held only for LTPA, whereas the relationship was non-existent or even opposite for all other domains. It is concluded that the assumed positive relationship between SES and PA is mainly a relationship between LTPA and SES. It is further suggested that the PA domain should always be considered when studying said relationships.
The creation of new roles commonly threatens the power and status of elite professionals through the substitution of their labour. In this paper we examine the institutional work carried out by elite ...professionals to maintain their professional dominance when threatened. Drawing on 11 case sites from the English National Health Service (NHS) where new nursing or medical roles have been introduced, threatening the power and status of specialist doctors, we observed the following. First, the professional elite respond through institutional work to supplant threat of substitution with the opportunity for them to delegate routine tasks to other actors and maintain existing resource and control arrangements over the delivery of services in a way that enhances elite professionals’ status. Second, other professionals outside the professional elite, but relatively powerful within their own professional group, are co-opted by the professional elite to engage in institutional work to maintain existing arrangements. Our work extends Lawrence and Suddaby’s typology of institutional work in three ways. First, we reveal how different types of institutional work interact, and how different types of institutional work cross categories of creating or maintaining institutions. Second, we show how an actor’s social position or status, both intra-professionally as well as inter-professionally, in the institutional field frame the institutional work they engage in. Third, the institutional work of ‘theorizing’ by professional elites appears particularly significant, specifically the focus of the institutional work to invoke the concept of ‘risk’ associated with any change in service delivery, which maintains the model of medical professionalism.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The cross-cultural factor invariance of the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) structure, and its relationships with the HEXACO personality model were analyzed in a large Spanish community sample. The ...effect of age, gender, and social position on the observed relationships was also investigated. The four-factor structure of the HSQ was largely invariant compared to the original one. Males and younger participants score higher on all four domains of the HSQ, but no relevant effect of social position is observed. The HEXACO-60 dimensions and facets predicted between 17% and 32% of the HSQ domains. Results and discussion broadly support that the HEXACO personality model can be used as an adequate personality framework for the research and understanding of humor styles.
Research has established a robust association between subjective socioeconomic status (SES) and health outcomes, which holds over and above the associations between objective markers of SES and ...health. Furthermore, comparative research on health inequalities has shown considerable variation in the relationship between different objective markers of SES and health across countries. Drawing on data from 29 countries, we present the first cross-national study on the subjective SES–health relationship. For two health outcomes, namely self-rated health (SRH) and psychological wellbeing, we are able to confirm that subjective SES is related to health in all countries under study, even when income, education, and occupational prestige are accounted for. Furthermore, we document considerable variation in the strength of the subjective SES–health association across countries. This variation however is largely independent of country differences in income inequality and country affluence. The health benefits of a high subjective SES appear to be slightly larger in more affluent countries, but only for SRH, not for psychological wellbeing.
•First cross-national study on subjective socioeconomic status (SES) and health.•Subjective SES and health are associated in all countries.•Subjective SES–health association holds even when controlling for objective SES.•Size of the subjective SES–health gradient not affected by income inequality.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
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