Adult health returns to education by key childhood social and economic indicators: Results from representative European data

Abstract

In the United States, associations between attained education and adult health typically are larger for those from disadvantaged childhood backgrounds. However, it remains unclear how specific key childhood indicators contribute to these adult health patterns, especially outside the United States. Drawing on the 2014 European Social Survey (20 countries; N=31544), we investigate the key childhood and adolescent indicators of parental education, childhood financial strain, and any serious household conflict growing up, given how these early exposures are known to correlate strongly with both educational attainment and adult health. In regressions with country fixed effects, we find across Europe that higher levels of education are more strongly linked to lessened adult depressive symptoms when childhood disadvantage is present in terms of lower levels of parental education or higher childhood financial strain specifically. However, adjusted predictions reveal that childhood financial strain contributes to this heterogeneity in educational returns far more strongly than parental education. For self-rated health, only childhood financial strain enhances estimated educational health benefits when considering all key childhood social and economic factors jointly. Similarly, childhood financial strain in particular enhances educational protection against overall rates of disease in adulthood. Overall, our findings support prior work on United States data revealing higher educational health returns given childhood disadvantage. At the same time, our findings across three distinct adult health indicators suggest the particular importance of childhood financial strain to understanding heterogeneity in educational health returns.

Higher Education, Bigger Networks? Differences by Family Socioeconomic Background and Network Measures

“…Put another way, tie count and compositional differences in adult social integration are biased toward nonkin among college graduates on average, but this especially true among those from disadvantaged parental backgrounds. Among those who come from more advantaged households, tie and composition gaps across college are noticeably more modest and even are nonsignificant in some cases, falling in line with prior findings on health, income, and civic participation (Andersson and Vaughan 2017;Bauldry 2014;Brand 2010;Ross and Mirowsky 2011;Schafer et al 2013). In contrast, frequency of socializing with close or community ties, although certainly lower among college graduates overall, shows relatively homogeneous patterns by parental background according to estimates here.…”

Cumulative risk of compromised physical, mental and social health in adulthood due to family conflict and financial strain during childhood: a retrospective analysis based on survey data representative of 19 European countries

“…Demographic characteristics included sex, age, parental occupation and education. 23 24 Parental education was assessed by asking respondents about the mother’s and father’s education, which were both categorised according to the same international classification as for the respondent. If both mother’s and father’s education were reported, the mean was used.…”

The Effects of Education on Mortality: Evidence From Linked U.S. Census and Administrative Mortality Data

“…Another possibility is that the biggest returns go to individuals who are the most advantaged because they are in a better position to leverage and consolidate the multiple social, economic, and health-related resources that education is thought to provide. This argument, which implies the presence of a cumulative advantage process, is typically referred to as the resource multiplication hypothesis (Andersson and Vaughan 2017;Ross and Mirowsky 2011;Schafer et al 2013).…”