Search

In this study we consider the health implications of the sequencing of a college degree vis-à-vis familial roles during the transition to adulthood. We hypothesize that people who earned a college degree before assuming familial roles will have better health than people who earned a college degree afterwards. To test this hypothesis, we focus on obesity and use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Results show that marriage before completion of college was associated with a 50% higher probability of becoming obese when compared with marriage after completion of college. Parenthood before college completion was associated with a greater than twofold increase in the probability of becoming obese when compared to parenthood afterwards for black men. These findings suggest that the well-established association of education with health depends on its place in a sequence of roles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how educational disparities in mortality emerge, grow, decline, and disappear across causes of death in the United States, and how these changes contribute to the enduring association between education and mortality over time. Focusing on adults age 40 to 64 years, we first examine the extent to which educational disparities in mortality persisted from 1989 to 2007. We then test the fundamental cause prediction that educational disparities in mortality persist, in part, by shifting to new health outcomes over time. We focus on the period from 1999 to 2007, when all causes of death were coded to the same classification system. Results indicate (1) substantial widening and narrowing of educational disparities in mortality across causes of death, (2) almost all causes of death with increasing mortality rates also had widening educational disparities, and (3) the total educational disparity in mortality would be about 25 percent smaller today if not for newly emergent and growing educational disparities since 1999. These results point to the theoretical and policy importance of identifying social forces that cause health disparities to widen over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present research addresses the dynamic transaction between extrinsic (occupational prestige, income) and intrinsic (job satisfaction) career success and the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality. Participants (N = 731) completed a comprehensive measure of personality and reported their job title, annual income and job satisfaction; a subset of these participants (n = 302) provided the same information approximately 10 years later. Measured concurrently, emotionally stable and conscientious participants reported higher incomes and job satisfaction. Longitudinal analyses revealed that, among younger participants, higher income at baseline predicted decreases in Neuroticism and baseline Extraversion predicted increases in income across the 10 years. Results suggest that the mutual influence of career success and personality is limited to income and occurs early in the career. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the substantial and prolonged sociological interest in health disparities, much remains unknown about the processes that initiate them. To investigate this topic, we focus on the case study of cocaine use, for which a socioeconomic disparity emerged across all age groups in a short period of time around 1990. We examine whether the newly-formed disparity represents a selective remnant of previous users or, instead, a selective recruitment of new users. To evaluate these two potential processes we use latent class regression on a nationally representative cohort with repeated measures of past-year cocaine use before and after 1990. Results support the "remnant" hypothesis and show that the newly-formed disparity resulted primarily because people in the lower social strata were less likely to have a trajectory of cocaine use with a sharp drop in use after 1990. These results point to the "remnant" concept as a way to bring together disparity analysis of very different and diverse health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. The persistence of the association over time and its generality across very different places suggests that no fixed set of intervening risk and protective factors can account for the connection. Instead, fundamental-cause theory views SES-related resources of knowledge, money, power prestige, and beneficial social connections 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. Recently, however, intelligence has been proposed as an alternative flexible resource that could fully account for the association between SES and health and thereby find its place as the epidemiologists' "elusive fundamental cause" (Gottfredson 2004). We examine the direct effects of intelligence test scores and adult SES in two data sets containing measures of intelligence, SES, and health. In analyses of prospective data from both the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and the Health and Retirement Survey, we find little evidence of a direct effect of intelligence on health once adult education and income are held constant. In contrast, the significant effects of education and income on health change very little when intelligence is controlled. Although data limitations do not allow a definitive resolution of the issue, this evidence is inconsistent with the claim that intelligence is the elusive fundamental cause of health disparities, and instead supports the idea that the flexible resources people actively use to gain a health advantage are the SES-related resources of knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses growth curve analysis to examine whether disparities in the occupational standing of White men relative to women and minorities grew larger or smaller with advancing age during the 1980s and 1990s. The analyses are based on The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area Follow-Up. Results indicate that disparities in occupational standing stayed constant over the life course across all demographic groups except for African Americans, whose gap in occupational status relative to Whites and Hispanics grew significantly larger with advancing age. Implications of these findings for theories of occupational inequality are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competing theoretical interpretations posit children's capacity for self-regulation as playing a spurious role, a mediating role, and a moderating role in the relationship between children's socioeconomic status (SES) and the adjustment to school. This study empirically examined these interpretations by investigating the rote of children's self-regulation in the relationship between children's SES and three school adjustment outcome: (1) overall problems in children's interpersonal relationships in school, (2) teachers assessment of hyperactivity-attention deficiency, and (3) teachers' expectations of children's present and future scholastic ability. The results indicated that associations between self-regulation outcomes and the adjustment to school were not spurious; they persisted after children's SES background was controlled Self-regulation served as a mediator of the association between children's SES and both interpersonal problems at school and teachers' expectations, and self-regulation served as a moderator of the relationship between children's SES and teachers' assessment of hyperactivity-attention deficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies document lower levels of depression among adults with higher education, but little is known about the way in which the association varies over the life course. Do depression levels diverge or converge across educational strata with age? This study investigates how the association between education and depression changes with age and tests the extent to which these changes are accounted for by physical health problems, widowed status, employment status, coping resources, household income, and financial strain. Data for this investigation come from the Work, Family, and Well-Being Study, 1990, a nationally representative sample of 2,031 adults aged 18 to 90 interviewed by telephone. Findings indicate that the association between depression and education strengthens with increasing age. Physical health problems among adults with lower education account for most of the diverging gap in depression. These results show that an integration of insights from the stress paradigm and the life course perspective can lead to a fuller understanding of socioeconomic inequality and its influence on psychological functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The values that shape individuals' career decisions are not necessarily reinforced by subsequent work experience. Those who value service to society, for example, are most likely to enter teaching, but qualitative research suggests that service-oriented teachers encounter much frustration and are prime candidates for leaving teaching. This study investigated the effect of motivation for service on persistence in teaching among two cohorts of American teachers: a 1960s cohort in an era that highlighted the call to public service and a 1970s cohort in a more egocentric era. The authors found that strong service values increased the likelihood that men in both cohorts and women in the 1970s cohort would leave the profession, but not women in the 1960s cohort, when few alternative careers were open to women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People make planful decisions about school and work, but structures of opportunity both constrain and enable pathways to achievement. What is the role of planful competence in times of social change? Drawing on data from the Stanford-Terman sample, the authors examine the role of history and adolescent planfulness in the attainment of men who were born between 1904 and 1917. Men born between 1904 and 1910 avoided the labor markets of the Great Depression by extending their higher education; adolescent planfulness was of little consequence for their adult educational attainment, since they stayed in school irrespective of their planfulness. However, men born between 1911 and 1917 faced viable options between school and work, especially in the postwar economy; for these men, adolescent planfulness was a strong, positive predictor of educational attainment. These findings are compared with insights from the 1962 Occupational Changes in a Generation data set, a nationally representative sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The military is described as a social context that contributes to the (re-)initiation or intensification of cigarette smoking. We draw on data from the 1985-2014 National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to conduct complementary sub-studies of the influence of military service on men's smoking outcomes across the life course. Descriptive findings from an age-period-cohort analysis of NSDUH data document higher probabilities of current smoking and heavy smoking among veteran men across a broad range of cohorts and at all observed ages. Findings from sibling fixed-effects Poisson models estimated on the WLS data document longer durations of smoking among men who served in the military and no evidence that selection explains the observed relationship. Together, these results provide novel and potentially generalizable evidence that participation in the military in early adulthood exerts a causal influence on smoking across the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]