Socioeconomic Status and Adult Life Expectancy in Early 20th-Century Sweden: Evidence from Full-Count Micro Census Data
Year: 2018
Type: report
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: All over the developed world there is a SES gradient in health and mortality for adults. Thesemortality differentials have also widened since the 1970s in the countries for which there aredata. Our knowledge about conditions in the more distant past is much more rudimentary, andwe do not know when and why the mortality gradient emerged. In this paper we studydifferences in life expectancy at age 60 by SES, controlling for unobserved spatial and family-of-origin heterogeneity. The analysis is based on individual-level mortality data covering theentire population of Sweden, which have been linked to the full count censuses of 1880, 1890,1900 and 1910 using probabilistic linking methods. Using data on occupation we measureSES by HISCLASS. Our findings show that upper/middle class men had shorter lifeexpectancy than the working class, and that farmers had the longest life expectancy of allgroups. For women the mortality differentials were smaller and the pattern totally different,with longest life expectancy for the high-status groups, and the shortest for low-status groups.These results suggest that today’s mortality gradient by SES is of a recent origin coincidingwith the development of modern medicine and welfare society.
Authors: Dribe, Martin, Eriksson, Björn
Institution: Lund University
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
OpenAlex ID: W7166496350