Division of Neonatology, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Matern Child Health J. 2012 May;16(4):834-43. doi: 10.1007/s10995-011-0791-z.
Appropriate measurement of socioeconomic status (SES) in health research can be problematic. Conventional SES measures based on 'objective' indicators such as income, education, or occupation may have questionable validity in certain populations. The objective of this investigation was to determine if a relatively new measurement of SES, subjective social status (SSS), was more consistently and strongly associated with multiple health outcomes for low income mothers. Data available from a large scale community-based study examining maternal and infant health for a low income urban population were used to examine relationships between SSS and a wide range of postpartum physical and emotional health outcomes. Crosstabulations and multivariate analyses focused on the breadth and depth of these relationships; in addition, the relative strength of the relationships between SSS and the health outcomes was compared to that of conventional measures of SES, including both income and education. SSS was significantly related to all physical and emotional health outcomes examined. The overall pattern of findings indicated that these relationships were independent of, as well as more consistent and stronger than, those between conventional measures of SES and postpartum health outcomes. SSS represents an important dimension of the relationship between SES and postpartum physical and emotional health. In low income populations the failure to account for this dimension likely underestimates the influence of SES on postpartum health. This has important implications for the interpretation of findings in empirical studies which seek to control for the effects of SES on maternal health outcomes.
在健康研究中，适当衡量社会经济地位（SES）可能会出现问题。基于收入、教育或职业等“客观”指标的传统 SES 衡量标准在某些人群中可能存在有效性问题。本研究旨在确定一种相对较新的 SES 衡量标准，即主观社会地位（SSS），是否与低收入母亲的多种健康结果更一致、更紧密地相关。本研究使用了一项大规模基于社区的研究的数据，该研究旨在调查低社会经济地位城市人口的母婴健康状况，以检验 SSS 与广泛的产后身体和心理健康结果之间的关系。交叉表和多元分析侧重于这些关系的广度和深度；此外，还比较了 SSS 与健康结果之间的关系强度与 SES 的传统衡量标准（包括收入和教育）之间的关系强度。SSS 与所有检查的身体和心理健康结果均显著相关。总体研究结果表明，这些关系独立于 SES 与产后健康结果之间的关系，并且更一致且更强。SSS 代表 SES 与产后身体和情绪健康之间关系的重要方面。在低收入人群中，如果不考虑这一方面，可能会低估 SES 对产后健康的影响。这对于解释旨在控制 SES 对产妇健康结果影响的实证研究结果具有重要意义。
