Compositional and contextual approaches to the study of health behaviour and outcomes: using multi-level modelling to evaluate Wilkinson's income inequality hypothesis (original) (raw)

Income inequality and health: Importance of a cross-country perspective

Social Science & Medicine, 2010

This paper uses a unique dataset-containing information collected in 2006 on individuals aged 40-79 in 21 countries throughout the world to examine whether individual income, relative income in a reference group, and income inequality are related to health status across middle/low and high-income countries. The dependent variable is self-assessed health (SAH), and as a robustness check, activities of daily living (ADL) are considered. The focus is particularly on assumptions regarding an individual's reference group and on how the estimated relationships depend on the level of economic development. Correcting for national differences in health reporting behavior, individual absolute income is found to be positively related to individual health. Furthermore, in the high-income sample, there is strong evidence that average income within a peerage group is negatively related to health, thus supporting the relative income hypothesis. In middle/low-income countries, it is instead average regional income that is negatively associated with health. Finally, there is evidence of a negative relationship between income inequality and individual health in high-income countries. Overall, the results suggest that there might be important differences in these relationships between high-income and middle/low-income countries.

The wider determinants of inequalities in health: a decomposition analysis

International Journal for Equity in Health, 2011

Background: The common starting point of many studies scrutinizing the factors underlying health inequalities is that material, cultural-behavioural, and psycho-social factors affect the distribution of health systematically through income, education, occupation, wealth or similar indicators of socioeconomic structure. However, little is known regarding if and to what extent these factors can assert systematic influence on the distribution of health of a population independent of the effects channelled through income, education, or wealth. Methods: Using representative data from the German Socioeconomic Panel, we apply Fields' regression based decomposition techniques to decompose variations in health into its sources. Controlling for income, education, occupation, and wealth, we assess the relative importance of the explanatory factors over and above their effect on the variation in health channelled through the commonly applied measures of socioeconomic status.

The Effects Of Individual-Level Income And Contextual-Level Income Inequality On Health

2016

THE EFFECTS OF INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL INCOME AND CONTEXTUAL-LEVELINCOME INEQUALITY ON HEALTH by BETH SIMMERT December 2015 Advisor: Dr. Krista Brumley Major: Sociology Degree: Doctor of Philosophy The relationship between income inequality and health is often studied at either the individual-level or contextual-level. The purpose of this research is to assess both of these levels, by simultaneously examining the individual and contextual contributions of income inequality on health. To address this research objective, I use data for 14,126 respondents from the 2006 wave of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative sample of Americans over 50. For this analysis, I use multilevel modeling with fixed and random intercepts to assess the relationship between income inequality and three measures of health. This study has two main findings. First, an increase in individual income predicts better self-rated, physical, and mental health in middle and older aged adults, but...