Psychosocial resources and social health inequalities in France: Exploratory findings from a general population survey

Florence Jusot, Michel Grignon () and Paul Dourgnon

Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers from McMaster University

Abstract: We study the psychosocial determinants of health, and their impact on social inequalities in health in France. We use a unique general population survey to assess the respective impact on selfassessed health status of subjective perceptions of social capital controlling for standard socio-demographic factors (occupation, income, education, age and gender). The survey is unique for two reasons: First, we use a variety of measures to describe self-perceived social capital (trust and civic engagement, social support, sense of control, and selfesteem). Second, we can link these measures of social capital to a wealth of descriptors of health status and behaviours. We find empirical support for the link between the subjective perception of social capital and health. Sense of control at work is the most important determinant of health status. Other important ones are civic engagement and social support. To a lesser extent, sense of being lower in the social hierarchy is associated with poorer health status. On the contrary, relative deprivation does not affect health in our survey. Since access to social capital is not equally distributed in the population, these findings suggest that psychosocial factors can explain a substantial part of social inequalities in health in France.

Keywords: social capital; social support; relative deprivation; sense of control; social health inequalities; France (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2007-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap189.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap189.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap189.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Psychosocial Resources and Social Health Inequalities in France: Exploratory Findings from a General Population Survey (2007)
Working Paper: Psychosocial resources and social health inequalities in France: Exploratory findings from a general population survey (2007)
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:mcm:sedapp:189

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers from McMaster University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().