Contextual effects on subjective social position: Evidence from European countries

Abstract

This study investigated subjective social position in 21 European countries using data from the social inequality module of the International Social Survey Programme 2009. Subjective social position shows people’s self-location in a social hierarchy. Most studies on subjective social position have typically involved a few countries and neglected the role of national educational and occupational structures. We hypothesise that these characteristics, together with national-level economic factors, modify the effect of individual-level characteristics on subjective social location. Our expectations are based on extended reference group thesis, the big-fish-little-pond and stigmatisation arguments. The results of multi-level analysis indicated that the extent of educational and income inequalities in society as well as occupational structures influence the importance of individual incomes, education and occupations for estimating social position.

Subjective Socioeconomic Status and Health in Cross-National Comparison

“…Also, given that income can serve as a buffer for the stress individuals face in their lives, low-income individuals in less egalitarian societies should be more stressed and, thus, less healthy, exacerbating the health gradient in less egalitarian countries. Semyonov et al (2013) point to the neo-materialist pathway (Lynch et al, 2000) that is suggested to connect income inequality and average population health. According to this pathway, societies with a high degree of income inequality are also characterized by a country's systematic underinvestment across a wide range of human, physical, and social infrastructures.…”

“…The relationship between objective and subjective socioeconomic status (SES) is a classic topic within sociology (Evans and Kelley, 2004;Lindemann and Saar, 2014;Marx, 1976) that has recently resurfaced in public health research (Adler, 2013;Nobles et al, 2013;Singh-Manoux et al, 2005;Wolff et al, 2010). While sociological research on the issue long focused on class conflict and the potential for social revolution, public health research has discovered a robust association between subjective SES and a diverse range of health outcomes, usually over and above the influence of objective measures of social status.…”

“…Different indicators of SES cannot be used interchangeably (Torssander and Erikson, 2010), as they all tap at different, loosely related aspects of SES and vary in the strength of their association to health. Given the variation in levels of subjective SES across countries (Lindemann and Saar, 2014), we expect that comparing subjective SES-health gradients across societies is a valuable contribution to the literature. In fact, a recent review article on subjective SES and health explicitly demanded more cross-nationally comparative research on the subjective SES-health relationship (Euteneuer, 2014).…”

The politics of social status: economic and cultural roots of the populist right

“…Beginning in 1987, many include a question asking respondents to place themselves on a ten-point social ladder reflecting their position in society. 9 This question is widely seen as a good measure of subjective social status with adequate test-retest reliability (Operario, Adler and Williams 2004;Evans and Kelley 2004;Lindemann and Saar 2014). It accommodates a diverse set of potential determinants and offers more cross-national comparability and greater independence from political context than alternate measures that ask respondents to express a 'working' or 'middle' class identity (cf.…”

“…16 In the preceding estimations, we focused on variation in the absolute level of social status across respondents at a single point in time (namely, the level of social status they report on a ten-point scale), using fixed effects to adjust for variations in the national mean. 17 However, these national means vary considerably across countries and time in response to a wide range of factors, including most notably the aggregate performance of the economy; and, for the purposes of understanding why support for rightwing populism may have risen over time within some sub-groups of the populace, the most relevant factor is how the status of those groups has changed relative to the status of other groups (Lindemann and Saar 2014;Poppitz 2016). Therefore, in this diachronic analysis, we will focus on the relative social status of a group, namely, the distance between the average level of subjective social status reported by members of the group and the mean level of subjective social status within the society as a whole at that point in time.…”