CIAO DATE: 03/06

The Resources that Matter: Fundamental Social Causes of Health Disparities and the Challenge of Intelligence

Abstract

A robust and very persistent association between indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) and the onset of life-threatening disease is a prominent concern of medical sociology that has strongly linked it to broader issues within the discipline. The persistence of the association across time and place suggests that no fixed set of intervening risk and protective factors can account for the connection. Instead, SES-related resources of knowledge, money, power, prestige and beneficial social connections are seen as flexible resources that allow people to avoid risks and adopt protective strategies no matter what the risk and protective factors are in a given place or time. But SES-related resources are not the only flexible resources available to people who seek to maximize their health. Cognitive ability is another resource that could be useful in crafting a healthy life-style in many different circumstances and because it is also associated with educational attainment it could fully account for the SES-health association. To evaluate the relative importance of SES-related resources as compared to cognitive resources we analyze two sets of data containing the requisite measures of cognitive ability, SES and health. In analyses of prospective data from both the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and the Health and Retirement Survey we find we no evidence of an effect of cognitive ability on health once education and income are held constant. In contrast the significant effects of education and income on health change very little when cognitive ability is controlled. We conclude that SES-related resources are the resources that matter for health.

Front Cover (PDF format, 1 page, 207.9 KB)
Full Text (PDF format, 33 pages, 248.0 KB)
Back Cover (PDF format, 2 pages, 1.54 MB)