Education, health behavior, and working conditions during the pandemic: evidence from a German sample

ABSTRACT

Education is a main cause of health inequality because it influences health behavior as well as structural conditions that impact health, such as living and working conditions. We examine how different educational groups reacted to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany by looking at health-related behavior – social distancing, increased hygiene, and mask wearing – as well as changes in working conditions – work from home, reduced working hours, and not working – as a structural indicator that can mitigate the risk of infection. More than three quarters of respondents in all educational groups complied with recommended social distancing and hand hygiene behaviors, and differences by education did not exceed ten percentage points. Regarding working conditions, highly educated respondents had a likelihood of over 45 percent to work from home during the pandemic. This number decreased to 17 and 11 percent for those with intermediate and low levels of education, respectively. It seems that education-based inequalities in the risk of infection with COVID-19 do not primarily stem from differences in health behavior but rather from structural causes, that is, inability to practice social distancing at work.

KEYWORDS:

• Health behavior
• health inequality
• education
• working conditions
• coronavirus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are publicly available from GESIS Data Archive at http://doi.org/10.4232/1.13520.

Notes

1 A comparison of German Microcensus data with the GESIS panel online subsample in terms of age, gender, and education can be found at https://osf.io/2av4d/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kerstin Hoenig

Kerstin Hoenig heads the research infrastructures department at the German Institute for Adult Education. Her research interests include sociology of education, educational inequality, social capital, and quantitative methods.

Sebastian E. Wenz

Sebastian E. Wenz is a postdoc researcher at GESIS. His research interests include discrimination, sociology of education, and quantitative methods.