Is Death “The Great Equalizer†? The Social Stratification of Death Quality in the United States

Deborah Carr

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2016, vol. 663, issue 1, 331-354

Abstract: Socioeconomic status (SES) gradients in mortality risk are well documented, although less is known about whether the quality of older adults’ dying experiences is stratified by SES. I focus on six core components of a “good death†: pain and symptom management, acceptance, medical care that is concordant with one’s preferences, dying at home, emotional preparation, and formal preparations for end-of-life care. Analyses are based on four data sets spanning the 1980s through 2010s, a period marked by rising economic inequalities: Changing Lives of Older Couples (1986–1994), Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (1993–2010), New Jersey End of Life study (2005–2007), and Wisconsin Study of Families and Loss (2010–2014). I find evidence of SES disparities in two outcomes only: pain and advance care planning (ACP), widely considered an important step toward a “good death.†Implications for health care policy and practice, against the backdrop of the Affordable Care Act implementation, are discussed.

Keywords: advance care planning; death; dying; inequality; pain; affordable care act (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716215596982 (text/html)

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:sae:anname:v:663:y:2016:i:1:p:331-354

DOI: 10.1177/0002716215596982

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().