SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND HEALTHCARE

Socioeconomic Status and Healthcare

Socioeconomic Status and Healthcare

Introduction

Measures of socioeconomic status (SES) purport to represent the relative distribution of prestige in a society. In many societies, socioeconomic status is significantly associated with culture and ethnicity. For example, in the United States, European Americans have significantly higher per capita incomes and significantly lower poverty rates than all other major ethnic groups. Furthermore, these SES discrepancies play a causal role in many of the deficits in academic performance, mental health, and physical health that other U.S. ethnic groups show when compared with European Americans. The close association between ethnicity and SES, as well as the relationship between SES and important psychosocial variables, point to the importance for psychologists of understanding socioeconomic status. The term socioeconomic status usually denotes the relative position of individuals, families, or groups into stratified social systems. Context is vital for understanding psychological processes, and socioeconomic status (SES) is one prominent contextual variable that has pervasive influence in healthcare and applied developmental science (Bornstein, 2003).

Discussion

Specification of socioeconomic status plays several key roles in applied developmental, psychological, and social science. First, socioeconomic status is a sociodemographic marker variable. It is essential to document the sociodemographic characteristics of study participants to describe the characteristics of the study sample adequately and to ensure proper comparability and generalizability. Second, SES is regularly associated with a wide variety of human health and disorder indexes as well as, third, with variations in parenting and child development (Bradley, 2002).

Bidirectional relations between SES and human healthcare have been systematically and consistently reported in the sociological, epidemiological, and psychiatric literatures. Socioeconomic status is associated with rates of mortality and morbidity from almost every type of physical disease and disorder. Similar significant connections exist between SES and a great number of psychological processes. For example, a cross-national study conducted on a sample of 29,644 people in seven countries (Brazil, Canada, Germany, Holland, Mexico, Turkey, and the United States) by the World Health Organization-International Consortium in Psychiatric Epidemiology (WHO-ICPE, 2000) showed that the prevalence of anxiety, mood, and substance use disorders are significantly related to the main indicators of SES (education, occupation, and income). Likewise, three large-scale studies, two American and one British, that together mobilized more than 40,000 participants associated socioeconomic status with the prevalence of many physical and mental disorders, as well as subjective well-being (Bornstein, 2003).

Socioeconomic Status and Physical Healthcare

There is a clear relationship between SES and health, as indicated by studies that have found evidence of a gradient where low SES is correlated with most (but not all) diseases, and the likelihood of contracting or experiencing disease decreases as socioeconomic status increases. Relationships between various socioeconomic indicators and physical diseases have been found, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and certain types of cancer. Level of education alone has been cited as a predictor of mortality and morbidity in the United States and other countries (Bradley, 2002).

SES is highly correlated with physical health for various reasons. Access to health care, safe workplace conditions, and supportive social networks ...