Finch Brian Karl
RAND Corporation, 1700 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90407, USA.
Demography. 2003 Nov;40(4):675-99. doi: 10.1353/dem.2003.0033.
Although relationships between social conditions and health have been documented for centuries, the past few decades have witnessed the emergence of socioeconomic gradients in health and mortality in most developed countries. These gradients indicate that health improves, although decreasingly so, at higher levels of socioeconomic status. To minimize problems with reverse causality, I tested competing hypotheses for observed socioeconomic gradients for infant mortality outcomes. I found no support for the income-inequality hypothesis and negligible support for the occupational-grade hypothesis. The results indicate that absolute material conditions are the most important determinants of socioeconomic effects on the risk of infant mortality and that while poverty has the most pronounced effect on risk, income is decreasingly salutary across the majority of the mortality gradient.
尽管社会状况与健康之间的关系已有数百年的记载，但在过去几十年里，大多数发达国家都出现了健康和死亡率方面的社会经济梯度。这些梯度表明，社会经济地位越高，健康状况虽改善程度渐趋减弱，但仍会有所改善。为尽量减少反向因果关系带来的问题，我对观察到的婴儿死亡率结果的社会经济梯度的相互竞争假设进行了检验。我没有发现对收入不平等假设的支持，对职业等级假设的支持也微乎其微。结果表明，绝对物质条件是社会经济因素对婴儿死亡风险影响的最重要决定因素，虽然贫困对风险的影响最为显著，但在大多数死亡率梯度范围内，收入的有益作用在逐渐减弱。
