A multilevel analysis of perceived intergenerational mobility and welfare state preferences

Preventive Medicine Reports

Jarosz

2019

Self Cite

Any systematic errors in self-reported height, a measure commonly used in health research, may produce biased BMI estimates and reduce the effectiveness of public health interventions. To our knowledge, none of the studies evaluating the validity of self-reported height explore this issue in cross-national settings. This study analyses data on a sub-set of 750 individuals with information on self-reported and measured height from the Life in Transition Survey (LITS) conducted in 34 European and Central Asian countries in 2016. We make use of the unique design of LITS in which all respondents reported their height, but in one randomly selected primary sampling unit in each country the actual height was also measured, using a portable stadiometer. In addition to analysing individual-level characteristics, using a multiply imputed dataset for missing data and multilevel mixed-effects regressions, we test if macro-level factors are associated with respondents under- or over-reporting their height. We find that on the aggregate level self-reported and measured height estimates are not statistically different, but some socio-demographic groups such as women and those who live in rural areas are likely to overestimate their height. Adjusting for this bias would lead to the higher estimates of the proportion of individuals who are overweight and obese. The results from multilevel analysis also show that macro-level factors do not per se explain the likelihood of misreporting height, but rather some of the effects of individual characteristics are moderated by income inequality.

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inequality, validity of self-reported height, and its implications for BMI estimates: An analysis of randomly selected primary sampling units' data

Preventive Medicine Reports

Jarosz

2019

Self Cite

“…Gapminder is arguably the only comparative dataset which provides information on the level of economic development for most years of the 20th century for each country included in LITS. This allows me to derive information on the level of economic development for individuals who were born even before the Second World War (Jarosz and Gugushvili, 2019). To understand how change in economic performance between individuals' birth years and 2010 is associated with their perceptions of intergenerational mobility, I calculate the difference between these two measures (mean 9068, SD 8142).…”

Section: Contextual-level Explanatory Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The relevance of understanding subjective perception of intergenerational mobility is important because it has been shown that this type of perception is associated with various attitudinal, behavioural, and health-related outcomes. Those who perceive being upwardly socially mobile support individual explanations of why some people are in need and larger income differences, and oppose certain welfare state programmes such as housing and old-age pensions (Gugushvili, 2016b(Gugushvili, , 2016a(Gugushvili, , 2019Guillaud, 2013). Perceived downward social mobility has also been linked to reduced defence of the societal system in which individuals reside (Day and Fiske, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why do people perceive themselves as being downwardly or upwardly mobile?

2020

Acta Sociologica

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This study explores individual and contextual explanations of why some people perceive themselves as being mobile and others do not. While subjective social position in recent decades has become an important topic of sociological enquiry, only a handful of studies explicitly investigate the nature of subjective perception of intergenerational mobility. When assessing their performance in comparison to their parents, individuals are likely to consider many other aspects of their lives than the attainment of socio-economic position. For empirical analysis, I operationalise an objective indicator of intergenerational mobility, often assumed to be the central explanation of perceptions of mobility, by means of intergenerational educational trajectories. In addition to exploring individual-level explanations, I use multilevel mixed-effects Poisson regression models to test how contextual environment is associated with perceived intergenerational mobility across 35 societies in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Results indicate that an objective measure of intergenerational mobility and other individual-level factors are important explanations of subjective intergenerational mobility. Further, the difference in economic development between individuals’ birth years and the year of interview is the most salient contextual factor explaining perceived intergenerational mobility, while contemporary economic development and short-term economic growth also reduce the likelihood of perceived downward mobility. The findings of this study contribute to sociological literature by highlighting the importance of contextual environment and factors beyond socio-economic characteristics for individuals’ perception of intergenerational mobility.

“…After deletion of missing information and censoring individuals aged below 20 (those who had not yet achieved their full height), 17,331 men and 21,909 women were included in the analyses. The LITS has been used in comparative social and health research (Gugushvili, 2019;, but post-socialist countries have generally been under-represented in multi-country surveys (Slomczynski & Tomescu-Dubrow, 2006). Also, there are no other comprehensive accounts of the association between parental socioeconomic characteristics and children's anthropometric dimensions in the majority of the analysed countries.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parental education, health literacy and children’s adult body height

Jarosz

2019

J. Biosoc. Sci.

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Human anthropometric traits, while significantly determined by genetic factors, are also affected by an individual’s early life environment. An adult’s body height is a valid indicator of their living conditions in childhood. Parental education has been shown to be one of the key covariates of individuals’ health and height, both in childhood and adulthood. Parental functional literacy has been demonstrated to be another important determinant of child health, but this has largely been overlooked in studies on height. The objective of this study was to analyse the associations between parents’ education, their functional literacy and their children’s adult body height. The study used data for 39,240 individuals from the 2016 wave of the nationally representative Life in Transition Survey (LITS) conducted in 34 countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Using linear and Poisson models, regression adjustment treatment estimators and multilevel mixed-effects linear regressions, the study analysed the links between mother’s and father’s educational attainment, parental functional literacy, measured by the number of books in the childhood home, and children’s adult height. The models also included other individual and contextual covariates of height. The results demonstrated that mother’s educational attainment and parental functional literacy have independent associations with children’s adult body height. Sufficient literacy skills of the parent may have a positive effect on children’s growth even if parental education is low. These associations remained significant across time. The study also provides evidence of a widening of the height gap for men born in the period just before and after systemic transition in post-socialist societies, which may suggest an increase in social differences in early living standards.