Objective and Subjective Socioeconomic Status, Their Discrepancy, and Health: Evidence from East Asia

Socioeconomic status (SES) is largely understood to be a fundamental determinant of health. Recently, subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) has emerged as a potentially important predictor of health above and beyond traditional (i.e., objective) SES indicators (OSS). The current study adds to this emerging body of research by examining the potentially important role of status discrepancies for health outcomes. We used nationally representative data from three East Asian countries (China, Japan, and South Korea) (2010 East Asian Social Survey) and a non-linear statistical technique (i.e., diagonal mobility model) to simultaneously model the independent contributions of OSS and SSS and their discrepancy for three health outcomes. Findings showed that SSS does, in fact, explain additional variation in health net of OSS in most cases, and status discrepancy is not associated with any of the three health outcomes. While status discrepancy was not found to be a driving factor in determining the predictive power of SSS net of OSS (at least in East Asia), the present study adds robustness to the accumulating evidence that challenges the social inequality hypothesis and provides a basis from which future research can build and contribute further to the understanding surrounding socioeconomic status and health outcomes.