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Subjective Social Status: Construct Validity and Associations with Psychosocial Vulnerability and Self-Rated Health

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Abstract

Background

Subjective social status (SSS) predicts health outcomes independently of traditional, objective indicators of socioeconomic status (SES). However, the potential confounding and mediating effects of negative affect and similar psychosocial risk and resilience factors have not been adequately addressed through formal studies of convergent and discriminant validity of SSS measures.

Purpose

The current study provides such a test of construct validity and subsequently examines whether psychosocial factors mediate the relationship between SSS and self-rated health.

Methods

We examined the convergent and discriminant validity of the MacArthur scales of SSS relative to measures of psychosocial risk and resilience (i.e., neuroticism, depressive symptoms, optimism, and marital quality) as well as SES (i.e., income) in 300 middle-aged and older married US couples. We also tested a factor of psychosocial vulnerability as a mediator of the relationship between SSS and self-rated health.

Results

Findings indicated clear convergent and discriminant validity of the MacArthur scales. Further, controlling age and income, both the US and community measures of SSS predicted psychosocial factors for men, however, only the community measure was independently predictive for women. Psychosocial vulnerability significantly mediated the pathway between SSS and self-rated health for men and women after controlling age and income.

Conclusions

These results provide strong support for the construct validity of the MacArthur scales and provide additional evidence of the role of psychosocial risk and resilience factors as mediators of the effects of SSS on health.

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Notes

  1. The main analyses reported above examined men and women separately, and therefore did not violate assumptions regarding the independence of observations by including members of couples. However, to address directly the issue of couples as participants, we also performed dyadic analysis of all participants simultaneously using Structural Equation Modeling/path analysis [41] in order to account for the dependency between husbands’ and wives’ responses. This analysis replicated all the main findings of the analyses reported above. Importantly, a model including the mediational path for Psychosocial Vulnerability linking SSS and SRH fit the data significantly better than a model in which the mediational paths were fixed to zero, for both SSSus and SSSc (χ 2 difference = 137.7 and 156.1 respectively, both p < .001). Hence, when accounting for the dependent responses of husbands and wives, the models including the mediator were a significantly better description of the data, consistent with findings when men and women were analyzed separately.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Utah, 380 South 1530 East, Room 502, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112, USA

    Jenny M. Cundiff, Timothy W. Smith, Bert N. Uchino & Cynthia A. Berg

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  1. Jenny M. Cundiff
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  2. Timothy W. Smith
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  3. Bert N. Uchino
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  4. Cynthia A. Berg
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Correspondence to Jenny M. Cundiff.

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Cundiff, J.M., Smith, T.W., Uchino, B.N. et al. Subjective Social Status: Construct Validity and Associations with Psychosocial Vulnerability and Self-Rated Health. Int.J. Behav. Med. 20, 148–158 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-011-9206-1

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