IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v36y1993i4p441-450.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Socioeconomic status and physical health, how are they related? An empirical study based on twins reared apart and twins reared together

Author

Listed:
  • Lichtenstein, Paul
  • Harris, Jennifer R.
  • Pedersen, Nancy L.
  • McClearn, G.E.

Abstract

This investigation used the powerful combined twin and adoption design to assess the validity of three different hypotheses--social causation, childhood experiences, and health selection--on the origin of the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and health. The sample contains 99 pairs of monozygotic twins reared apart, 166 pairs of monozygotic twins reared together, 238 pairs of dizygotic twins reared apart, and 221 pairs of dizygotic twins reared together, who completed questionnaire items concerning their SES and health status. Genetic effects, environmental effects unique to the individual, as well as environmental effects shared by twins were involved in mediating the associations between SES and health. However, the relative importance of these effects varied for the different associations depending on the measures of health and SES respectively. The results indicate that social causation, childhood experiences, and health selection may all be important for the association between SES and health. It is argued that these hypotheses are not contradictory, rather the relationship between the complex dimensions SES and health may be explained by several different causes.

Suggested Citation

  • Lichtenstein, Paul & Harris, Jennifer R. & Pedersen, Nancy L. & McClearn, G.E., 1993. "Socioeconomic status and physical health, how are they related? An empirical study based on twins reared apart and twins reared together," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 441-450, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:36:y:1993:i:4:p:441-450
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(93)90406-T
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Palloni, Alberto & Milesi, Carolina & White, Robert G. & Turner, Alyn, 2009. "Early childhood health, reproduction of economic inequalities and the persistence of health and mortality differentials," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 68(9), pages 1574-1582, May.
    2. James Smith & Raynard Kington, 1997. "Demographic and economic correlates of health in old age," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 34(1), pages 159-170, February.
    3. Shimazu, Akihito & de Jonge, Jan, 2009. "Reciprocal relations between effort-reward imbalance at work and adverse health: A three-wave panel survey," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 60-68, January.
    4. Madsen, Mia & Andersen, Per K. & Gerster, Mette & Andersen, Anne-Marie N. & Christensen, Kaare & Osler, Merete, 2014. "Are the educational differences in incidence of cardiovascular disease explained by underlying familial factors? A twin study," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 182-190.
    5. Osler, Merete & Madsen, Mia & Nybo Andersen, Anne-Marie & Avlund, Kirsten & Mcgue, Matt & Jeune, Bernard & Christensen, Kaare, 2009. "Do childhood and adult socioeconomic circumstances influence health and physical function in middle-age?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 68(8), pages 1425-1431, April.
    6. Christiaan Monden, 2010. "Do Measured and Unmeasured Family Factors Bias the Association Between Education and Self-Assessed Health?," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 98(2), pages 321-336, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:36:y:1993:i:4:p:441-450. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.