Although incarceration rates have risen sharply since the 1970s, medical sociology has largely neglected the health effects of imprisonment. Incarceration might have powerful effects on health, especially if it instills stigma, and it could provide sociologists with another mechanism for understanding health disparities. This study identifies some of incarceration's direct and indirect effects and rigorously tests them using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It finds that incarceration has powerful effects on health, but only after release. A history of incarceration strongly increases the likelihood of severe health limitations. Furthermore, any contact with prison is generally more important than the amount of contact, a finding consistent with a stigma-based interpretation. Although this relationship is partly attributable to diminished wage growth and marital instability, the bulk of the effect remains even under the most stringent of specifications, including controls for intelligence and the use of fixed effects, suggesting a far-reaching process with a proliferation of risk factors. The study also finds that incarceration contributes only modestly to racial disparities, that there are few synergistic interactions between incarceration and other features of inequality, including schooling, and that the evidence for a causal effect is much weaker among persistent recidivists and those serving exceptionally long sentences. These study findings are inconsistent with recent speculation; nevertheless, incarceration is an important addition to sociology's research agenda. Exploring incarceration could lead to, among other things, a fruitful synergy among studies on fundamental causes, stigma, and stress.

Using the 1980 to 2002 General Social Survey, a repeated cross-sectional study that has been linked to the National Death Index through 2008, this study examines the changing relationship between self-rated health and mortality. Research has established that self-rated health has exceptional predictive validity with respect to mortality, but this validity may be deteriorating in light of the rapid medicalization of seemingly superficial conditions and increasingly high expectations for good health. Yet the current study shows the validity of self-rated health is increasing over time. Individuals are apparently better at assessing their health in 2002 than they were in 1980 and, for this reason, the relationship between self-rated health and mortality is considerably stronger across all levels of self-rated health. Several potential mechanisms for this increase are explored. More schooling and more cognitive ability increase the predictive validity of self-rated health, but neither of these influences explains the growing association between self-rated health and mortality. The association is also invariant to changing causes of death, including a decline in accidental deaths, which are, by definition, unanticipated by the individual. Using data from the final two waves of data, we find suggestive evidence that exposure to more health information is the driving force, but we also show that the source of information is very important. For example, the relationship between self-rated health and mortality is smaller among those who use the internet to find health information than among those who do not.

■ Abstract In recent years, scholars from a variety of disciplines have turned to the potential psychosocial determinants of health in pursuit of an explanation for socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities. This review discusses the literature on psychosocial factors and mental and physical health, focusing on the roles of subjective status, self/identity, and perceived discrimination. We argue that current research may have obscured important social psychological considerations and that it is an opportune time to reconsider the social psychology of disparities. A social psychology of disparities could provide a bridge between those who encourage research on health's "upstream" causes and those who encourage research on "downstream" mechanisms precisely because social psychology is concerned with the vast "meso" level of analysis that many allude to but few explicitly traverse. We point to the importance of person-environment interactions, contingencies, reciprocality, and meaning. Although psychosocial factors might not explain disparities in the manner much psychosocial research would seem to suggest, psychosocial factors are important causes in their own right and, when considered in a more sophisticated social psychological light, may help to refine disparities theory and research.

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Family instability has increased markedly since the 1970s, especially for already disadvantaged low-income and minority families (Cherlin 2010;Ellwood and Jencks 2004;McLanahan 2004). In response, a large literature has emerged on the effects of family instability, suggesting harmful effects of its key dimensions-divorce, separation, and nonmarital fertility-on children (e.g.