Socio-economic inequalities in bodily pain over the life cycle: longitudinal evidence from Australia, Britain and Germany
Stefanie Schurer,
Michael Shields and
Andrew Jones
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, 2014, vol. 177, issue 4, 783-806
Abstract:
type="main" xml:id="rssa12058-abs-0001">
We document the extent of socio-economic status (SES) inequalities in bodily pain in Australia, Britain and Germany, with a particular focus on whether such inequalities widen over the life course. Random-effects logistic and kernel regressions are used to estimate odds ratios of experiencing severe pain by income, educational qualification and occupational status, and to graph age–pain profiles, while accounting for individual heterogeneity. Cohort level regression analysis is used to control for cohort effects. Low SES is consistently related to higher levels of bodily pain in each country and inequalities widen with increasing age. The odds of experiencing severe bodily pain for individuals in the lowest, relative to the highest, household income quartile is up to two times higher, whereas the odds for those with minimum relative to university education are up to three times higher. For each country, the odds of experiencing severe pain by machine operators are around three times higher than for professionals. Maximum levels, and maximum SES differences in pain, are both reached at around age 60 years, with the differentials ranging between 0.2 and 0.7 of sample standard deviations. No convergence of pain profiles is observed by age 70 years. Controlling for cohort effects in the Australian data confirms the results from the age group analysis. Taken together these results suggest that low SES and manual work have cumulative health effects over the life cycle.
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/rssa.2014.177.issue-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jorssa:v:177:y:2014:i:4:p:783-806
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://ordering.onli ... 1111/(ISSN)1467-985X
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A is currently edited by A. Chevalier and L. Sharples
More articles in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A from Royal Statistical Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().