Subjective Social Status and Inflammation: Longitudinal Relationships Across Four Countries

CRIS SCIENTIFIC SEMINAR 2024-2025

TALK WITH Patrick Präg

Associate Professor of Sociology, CREST/ENSAE and Faculty member of the Department of Economics at Institut Polytechnique de Paris

My talk is work in progress and joint work with Asri Maharani (Manchester) and Lindsay Richards (Oxford). 
The persistence of health inequalities in rich, industrialized countries with good living conditions and elaborate health care systems is a puzzle. 
A crucial pathway is the link between stress, arising from feelings of inferiority in the social hierarchy, and inflammation. However, both robust longitudinal and cross-national evidence on this relationship is scarce. 

We analyze the association between subjective social status, a measure of feelings of inferiority, and C-reactive protein, a biomarker for inflammation, from two Western (US Health and Retirement Study, Midlife in the United States, English Longitudinal Study of Aging) and two non-Western (Indonesia Family Life Survey, Midlife in Japan) countries. 

We use descriptive methods to document the relationship and fixed-effects panel regression models that control for a vast array of possible confounders. 

We find a substantively small zero-order association between subjective social status and C-reactive protein in the US and the UK and no association in Indonesia and Japan. The fixed-effects estimator that includes time-varying controls such as wealth and accounts for unobserved time-constant factors such as genes or personality yields no association between subjective social status and C-reactive protein. 
Across longitudinal data from four Western and non-Western countries, we find no relationship between subjective social status and inflammation, casting doubt on central tenets of the psychosocial explanation of health inequalities.

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