Ties and inequalities in later life: welfare state regime and the role of social networks in health inequalities in later life in Europe

ABSTRACT

Cross-national comparisons on health inequalities have puzzled health researchers in the last years. Contrary to what is theoretically expected, Northern European countries, known for their advanced welfare state regime and universalistic policies in health and social protection, do not present smaller health inequalities than other European nations. Within the debate triggered by these surprising results, some authors consider the possibility that the differences among the welfare state regimes may be shaping the relevance of specific pathways or mechanisms underlining the association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and health. This research addresses this hypothesis by comparing the contribution of social networks to health inequality in later life across different welfare state regimes. Mediation effects between SEP and health by social networks variables are compared across four different welfare state regimes, using data from Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe. Findings suggest that the socioeconomic advantages in health are partially explained by the differentials in social integration and quality of social ties. Welfare state regimes appear to shape the contribution of social networks in health inequality concerning the implications of the exchanges of social support in health.

KEYWORDS:

• Welfare state regime
• health inequality
• social networks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniela Craveiro is a researcher in the Communication and Society Research Centre in University of Minho (CECS-UM). Her current research interests are on topics related to ageing society, health inequality and the welfare state.

ORCID

Daniela Craveiro http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4365-2255

Notes

1 Anttonen and Sipilä (1996) identified different configurations of formal and informal support availability in Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, Western European and Mediterranean countries. Leitner (2003) proposed a framework to account for the several modalities in the family role (familialism) in the provision of care, which allows to distinguish the care regimes from countries from the north (optional), centre (explicit) and south of Europe (implicit).

2 Data from Switzerland were also available in the survey, but they are omitted from this research due to the difficulty of classifying the welfare state regime of the country with the typology adopted.

Additional information

Funding

This paper uses data from SHARE Wave 4 (DOI: 10.6103/SHARE.w4.500). The SHARE data collection has been primarily funded by the European Commission through FP5 (QLK6-CT-2001-00360), FP6 (SHARE-I3: RII-CT-2006-062193, COMPARE: CIT5-CT-2005-028857, SHARELIFE: CIT4-CT-2006-028812) and FP7 (SHARE-PREP: N°211909, SHARE-LEAP: N°227822, SHARE M4: N°261982). Additional funding from the German Ministry of Education and Research, the U.S. National Institute on Aging (U01_AG09740-13S2, P01_AG005842, P01_AG08291, P30_AG12815, R21_AG025169, Y1-AG-4553-01, IAG_BSR06-11, OGHA_04-064) and from various national funding sources is gratefully acknowledged (see www.share-project.org) and this work is also supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia under doctoral degree grant [SFRH/BD/80052/2011].