Subjective social mobility and health in Germany

ABSTRACT

One’s current socioeconomic position is intimately tied to one’s health status. Further, childhood living conditions also exert lasting effects on the health of adults. However, studies on changes in one’s socioeconomic position over the life course rarely find consistent and systematic effects of social mobility for individual health and wellbeing. Such studies almost exclusively draw on objective measures of social mobility and do not consider subjective appraisals of social mobility by individuals themselves. We conduct an analysis of cross-sectional, representative German survey data to explore the question as to how subjective perceptions as opposed to objective accounts of occupational status mobility affect five self-reported health and wellbeing outcomes differentially. We show that objective and subjective accounts of social mobility overlap, yet this association is far from perfect. Further, there are relatively small associations between objective and subjective mobility accounts and health outcomes. Associations between subjective mobility perceptions and health outcomes are intriguingly independent of objective social mobility trajectories. Mismatches between objective and subjective mobility are also correlated with some health outcomes. We discuss implications of our findings that social mobility is associated with those aspects of health which are more closely related to psychological wellbeing rather than physical health.

KEYWORDS:

• Health
• social mobility
• intergenerational mobility
• subjective socioeconomic position
• occupational mobility

Acknowledgment

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for guidance, Lindsay Richards and Yizhang Zhao for comments on a previous draft, and Étienne Ollion and Francois Bonnet for help.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data analyzed in this study are openly available (Gesis 2013) and a Stata do-file replicating all analyses shown here is available on-line (Präg and Gugushvili 2021).

Additional information

Funding

Alexi Gugushvili was supported by a grant (UMO-2018/31/D/HS6/01877) from the National Science Center of Poland under the SONATA 14 program.

Notes on contributors

Patrick Präg

Patrick Präg is an assistant professor in quantitative sociology at CREST/ENSAE Paris. He’s interested in intergenerational transmission and social mobility as well as health and wellbeing.

Alexi Gugushvili

Alexi Gugushvili is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oslo. His core research interests lie in the fields of social stratification and mobility, public opinion and attitudes, and socio-economic and political determinants of population health and wellbeing.