Chapter 1. Property Ownership, Socioeconomic Status, and the Cold Virus

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Property Ownership, Socioeconomic Status, and the Cold Virus

Author: Mallory Malkin

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Property Ownership, Socioeconomic Status, and the Cold Virus

Socioeconomic and cultural contexts have an important impact on your health. This video clip illustrates the sociocultural perspective discussing how socioeconomic status (SES) impacts health, specifically how your parent’s property ownership influences cold susceptibility. More specifically, this video addresses the health disparities and differences among those who are lower SES compared to those who are wealthier.

Property Ownership, Socioeconomic Status, and the Cold Virus

SHELDON COHEN: There is a large literature that shows that people with lower socioeconomic status, lower income, education, wealth, are not as healthy as people with higher social economic status. That seems fairly obvious, right, poor people don't have access to medical care, whatever. But the relationship is more complex than that. The relationship is that as SES increases, your health increases all the way up the gradient. It's not just people in poverty or below the poverty level or people who can't afford health who are showing greater risk for health. It's this gradient where even people who are very wealthy are doing better than people who are kind of in the middle class, and reasonably well off, and have health care, and health insurance, and go to good physicians, and whatever.

So this has become of particular interest to psychologists, why is it being higher in SES related to better health? And there are a number of notions about feelings of control, and feelings of hostility, and social support. All these things also are graded with SES. As you go up the gradient, people report more social support, they have higher feelings of control, they're less hostile. So those kinds of issues are playing a role in health.

Now, we've got particularly interested in childhood socioeconomic status. So does your SES when your a child influence your susceptibility to disease when you're an adult? Now, there is maybe a dozen studies, many of them done in Britain, in these large cohort studies where they follow people born in a particular year from the time they're born through their lives that show that their parents occupation is related to mortality. So if they're parents were in low SES, basically they're at higher risk for mortality. And why does that happen?

So one simple explanation, which is less interesting is that, well, if your parents were low in SES, then you're going to be low in SES. So it's really the adult SES that's determining the outcome. But it looks like it's the child if all you're looking is the childhood. But of course, you can measure both of those. And then you can see does childhood predict above and beyond the adult SES.

Now, the mortality literature is a little mixed in this regard. Some studies find that adult SES doesn't matter, some studies find that it does matter. So we were interested in basically the susceptibility to infection notion that we use the cold study paradigm to look at in this regard. And we asked a fairly simple question, did your parents own their own home, meaning, they could be paying a mortgage that would be included in owning your own home, when you were one-year-old? When you were two years old? When you were three years old? So we ask them from the time they were 1 to 18.

And then we expose them to the virus, see if they get sick. So first thing we do is just count the number of years their parents own their own home from the time they were 18. And somewhat to our surprise, it turns out to be a spectacular predictor of colds when they're adults. OK, the more years your parents own their own home during your childhood, the less likely they are to get sick when we expose them to the virus.

Check Your Understanding

Question 1.1

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Question 1.2

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Question 1.3

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Question 1.4

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Question 1.5

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Question 1.6

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