Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci. 2019 Jan 1;74(1):181-191. doi: 10.1093/geronb/gby059.
Empirical investigations of cumulative dis/advantage typically treat health inequality as an intraindividual process rooted in early-life conditions and operating within the span of the individual life course, while literature on processes of intergenerational transmission has historically focused on socioeconomic mobility, largely overlooking health. The current study examines the persistence of work disability across generations and multiple explanations for this relationship, including the role of early-life disadvantage, childhood health, educational attainment, and social mobility.
We model latent classes of midlife work disability characterized by timing and stability using longitudinal data from the intergenerational component of the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (N = 3,328). Latent class analysis captures the initial risk of experiencing a work disability and how this risk changes across mid-life as a function of early-life conditions, childhood health, educational attainment, mobility, and parent's work disability.
Early disadvantage, childhood health, and educational attainment were associated with patterns of midlife work disability, and although upward mobility provided some protection, intergenerational continuity in health remained net of all of these factors.
Findings support the importance of looking beyond the individual life course to the transmission of health inequality across generations within families.
累积优势/劣势的实证研究通常将健康不平等视为一种个体内部过程，其根源在于生命早期的条件，并在个体的整个生命周期内发挥作用，而关于代际传递过程的文献在历史上主要关注社会经济流动性，在很大程度上忽略了健康。本研究考察了工作残疾在代际间的持续性及其关系的多种解释，包括生命早期劣势、儿童健康、教育程度和社会流动性的作用。
我们使用美国收入动态面板研究（Panel Study of Income Dynamics）代际部分的纵向数据，对中年工作残疾的潜在类别进行建模，这些潜在类别具有时间和稳定性的特点（N=3328）。潜在类别分析捕捉了经历工作残疾的初始风险，以及随着年龄的增长，这种风险如何因生命早期的条件、儿童健康、教育程度、流动性和父母的工作残疾而变化。
生命早期的劣势、儿童健康和教育程度与中年工作残疾模式有关，尽管向上的流动性提供了一定的保护，但在所有这些因素之外，健康的代际连续性仍然存在。
研究结果支持了超越个体生命周期，从家庭内部代际传递的角度看待健康不平等的重要性。
