Socioeconomic status (SES) is defined as a measure of one's combined economic and social status and tends to be positively associated with better health. This entry focuses on the three common measures of socioeconomic status; education, income, and occupation. I include definitions, theoretical background, and empirical support for each of these SES indicators and their relationship with health. SES is generally thought to influence health through three avenues: (1) SES influences health through the ability to purchase health promoting resources and treatments; (2) socialization of early health habits and continuing socialization of health habits differs by SES; and (3) it has been posited that, rather than SES influencing health, health influences SES – less healthy individuals complete fewer years of school, miss more work, and earn lower incomes.

Substance use (SU) stigma is one factor contributing to unmet need for SU treatment. Additionally, theory suggests that women and single parents who use substances experience enhanced stigma because they do not adhere to normative social expectations. This study examines differences in perceived stigma by gender and parenthood among those with unmet need for SU treatment using the 2003-2010 National Survey of Drug Use and Health ( = 1,474). Results indicate that women are more likely to report stigma as a barrier to treatment compared with men, though the interaction between gender and parenthood is not significant. We find that married parents report the highest level of stigma. We situate our findings in past health-related stigma research. We suggest that these results shed a light on stigma, particularly as it relates to family status, as a contributing factor to differences regarding SU treatment utilization. Finally, we raise a provocative question concerning social status and anticipated stigma.

Quality-of-life instruments have provided important advances in measuring the quality of life of pediatric patients receiving treatment for cancer. However, the bases of these instruments have not included first-hand reports from the patients; thus, these instruments may be conceptually incomplete. We directly solicited from pediatric patients their perspectives regarding their quality of life during treatment for cancer. We conducted two pilot studies: 23 patients (aged 8-15 years) participated in the first, a cross-sectional study; and 13 patients (aged 10-18 years) participated in the second, a 2-year longitudinal study. Data were analyzed by using a semantic-content method, and the following six domains were recognized in data from both of the studies: symptoms, usual activities, social/family interactions, health status, mood, and the meaning of being ill. These domains were compared with those of seven established pediatric oncology quality-of-life instruments, none of which included all six of these domains; the domain most frequently missing was the meaning of being ill domain. Here we present a new definition of the quality of life of pediatric oncology patients that is based on six domains; this definition may ensure the completeness and sensitivity of these important instruments.

Previous research fails to find a consistent association between obesity and acculturation for children. We theorize that social isolation shelters children of immigrants from the U.S. “obesiogenic” environment, but this protective effect is offset by immigrant parents’ limited capacity to identify and manage this health risk in the United States. We further theorize that these factors affect boys more than girls. We use data from over 20,000 children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort and find that boys whose parents were raised outside the United States weighed more and gained weight faster than any other group. However, within this group, sons of low English-proficient parents gained weight more slowly than sons of English-proficient parents. The results thus suggest that two dimensions of low acculturation—foreign place of socialization and social isolation—affect children’s weight gain in opposite directions and are more important for boys than girls.

According to the “immigrant epidemiological paradox,” immigrants and their children enjoy health advantages over their U.S.-born peers—advantages that diminish with greater acculturation. We investigated child obesity as a potentially significant deviation from this paradox for second-generation immigrant children. We evaluated two alternate measures of mother's acculturation: age at arrival in the United States and English language proficiency. To obtain sufficient numbers of second-generation immigrant children, we pooled samples across two related, nationally representative surveys. Each included measured (not parent-reported) height and weight of kindergartners. We also estimated models that alternately included and excluded mother's pre-pregnancy weight status as a predictor. Our findings are opposite to those predicted by the immigrant epidemiological paradox: children of U.S.-born mothers were less likely to be obese than otherwise similar children of foreign-born mothers; and the children of the least-acculturated immigrant mothers, as measured by low English language proficiency, were the most likely to be obese. Foreign-born mothers had lower (healthier) pre-pregnancy weight than U.S.-born mothers, and this was protective against their second-generation children's obesity. This protection, however, was not sufficiently strong to outweigh factors associated or correlated with the mothers' linguistic isolation and marginal status as immigrants.