Relationship between subjective social status and perceived health among Latin American immigrant women

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: to explore the relationship between socioeconomic status and subjective social status and explain how subjective social status predicts health in immigrant women. METHODS: cross-sectional study based on data from 371 Latin American women (16-65 years old) from a total of 7,056 registered immigrants accesse through community parthers between 2009-2010. Socioeconomic status was measured through education, income and occupation; subjective social status was measured using the MacArthur Scale, and perceived health, using a Likert scale. RESULTS: a weak correlation between socioeconomic and subjective social status was found. In the bivariate analysis, a significantly higher prevalence of negative perceived health in women with no education, low income, undocumented employment was observed. In the multivariate analysis, higher odds of prevalence of negative perceptions of health in the lower levels of the MacArthur scale were observed. No significant differences with the rest of the variables were found. CONCLUSIONS: the study suggests that subjective social status was a better predictor of health status than the socioeconomic status measurements. Therefore, the use of this measurement may be relevant to the study of health inequalities, particularly in socially disadvantaged groups such as immigrants.

Subjective Social Status and Self-Reported Health Among US-born and Immigrant Latinos

“…Subjective social status may also tap into migration and immigrant-related stressors likely to affect perceptions of relative worth and health, such as discrimination and economic hardship [24,[27][28][29][30][31][32]. A few studies show a subjective social status health effect among Latino immigrants adjusting for socioeconomic status [18,20,33]. Research analyzing the same data as this study found Latino immigrants who experience downward social mobility are at elevated risk of poor health [34,35].…”

“…The subjective status-health relationship appears to vary, in part, by race/ethnicity [11][12][13][14][15][16]. Though studies in Latin America have examined the subjective status-health relationship, few have tested this association among United States Latinos [11,[17][18][19][20][21]. This is an important research gap as U.S. Latinos, a multi-ethnic population, are on average disproportionately burdened by low incomes.…”

Differences in life satisfaction among older community-dwelling Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites

“…For example, the SF-36 has been shown to have adequate internal consistency and construct validity among Hispanics (Katerndahl, Amodei, Larme, & Palmer, 2002; Peek, Ray, Patel, Stoebner-May, & Ottenbacher, 2004), equivalent response patterns on the PHQ-9 have been found between English and Spanish-speaking Hispanic women (Merz, Malcarne, Roesch, Riley, & Sadler, 2011), and both our measures of objective cognitive function (Manly et al, 2011), and subjective cognitive complaints (Alders & Levine-Madori, 2010; Lagana & Sosa, 2004) have been used in previous studies of Hispanics. In contrast, findings on the psychometric properties of our measure of anxiety symptoms in Hispanics have been mixed (Asner-Self, Schreiber, & Marotta, 2006; Prelow, Weaver, Swenson, & Bowman, 2005; Torres, Miller, & Moore, 2013; Wiesner et al, 2010), and there is limited published research on the psychometric properties among Hispanics of the scales used to assess social functioning, positive psychological traits, and religiosity/spirituality (Katerndahl et al, 2002; Sanchon-Macias, Prieto-Salceda, Bover-Bover, & Gastaldo, 2013). …”

Subjective social status and health

“…Study populations range from representative samples of the USA and EU states [14][15][16][17], to large samples with civil servants from the UK and Brazil [10,18 & ,19], to children and adolescents [20 & , 21-23], to middle-aged and elderly populations [24][25][26][27][28][29], to ethnically diverse samples [8,30,31], to populations from developing countries [32][33][34][35], to immigrants [36][37][38], to pregnant women [39] and different clinical samples [40][41][42][43][44][45]. Findings from these studies indicate that lower SSS is related to several health indicators and risk factors for disease, including lower self-rated health, depressive symptoms, higher substance use, impaired sleep quality, functional decline, poor healthcare, food insecurity, poor oral health, biological risk factors, respiratory illness, reduced cardiovascular health, diabetes and mortality.…”