Do Adults Adjust their Socioeconomic Status Identity in Later Life?*

Subjective social status and health: Multidisciplinary explanations and methodological challenges

Since the early 2000s, evidence has been accumulating that subjective social status – a person’s sense of their own position on the social ladder – affects health above and beyond objective socioeconomic status. To date, however, little is known about how these distinct health effects of subjective social status can be explained. This article narratively reviews different explanatory approaches and key methodological challenges, backed up by empirical findings and supplemented by the authors’ own reflections. Both social–psychological and psychoneurobiological explanations can make a theoretically plausible contribution to explaining the subjective social status–health relationship. Experimental and panel designs appear promising for addressing important methodological challenges in this strand of research.

It's "the Joneses": the influence of objective and subjective socioeconomic status on subjective perceptions of aging

Positive subjective perceptions of aging predict various well-being, physical health, mental health, and longevity outcomes. Thus, it is important to consider what factors contribute to their formation. Socioeconomic status (SES) has been hypothesized to be one such factor, but past research has been mixed. We propose that subjective assessments of SES may better predict subjective perceptions of aging than traditional objective measures (e.g., income and education). The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of objective and subjective indicators of SES on subjective perceptions of aging. Participants (n = 296) from the Mindfulness and Anticipatory Coping Everyday study were recruited with a Human Intelligence Task on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Participants reported on their SES (i.e., income, education, and subjective social status) and subjective perceptions of aging (i.e., attitudes toward own aging, subjective age, and awareness of age-related gains and losses). Data were analyzed via hierarchical multiple regression with demographic and health variables entered first, followed by income and education, then subjective social status. Results demonstrated that although objective measures of SES did not contribute to predicting subjective perceptions of aging, those who rated themselves subjectively higher in their community social standing were more likely to possess positive aging attitudes, younger subjective ages, more awareness of age-related gains, and fewer awareness of age-related losses. These findings suggest that perceptions of doing better than one's neighbors (i.e., "the Joneses") may matter more for understanding subjective perceptions of aging than objective indicators of social status.

DOES LOWER SUBJECTIVE SOCIAL STATUS YIELD RISKIER BIOMARKER PROFILES?

Both objective and, more recently, subjective measures of low social status have been linked to poor health outcomes. It is unclear, however, through which precise physiological mechanisms such standing may influence health, although it has been proposed that those of lower status may have biomarker profiles that are more dysregulated (and hence pose a greater risk for poorer health). The main objective of this study was to investigate whether lower subjective social standing is associated with riskier neuroendocrine biomarker profiles. Data were from the Social Environment and Biomarkers of Aging Study (SEBAS), a nationally representative survey of Taiwanese men and women (ages 54-91) conducted in Taiwan in 2000. Five neuroendocrine markers (cortisol, dehydroepiandrosterone sulphate (DHEAS), adrenaline, noradrenaline and dopamine) were analysed both separately and collectively in an index termed neuroendocrine allostatic load (NAL) in relation to status - both self-reported and as measured through objective socioeconomic status (SES) indicators. For the biomarker DHEAS, some connection was found between its levels and the measures of status, but for the other markers and the NAL index almost no connection was found. The overall negative finding of this paper would be further supported with more and different measures of neuroendocrine system function and a reordering of the subjective social status questions in the survey such that the one probing about status in the community (that has no prompt) was asked before the one probing about status in all of Taiwan (which has a SES prompt).