Socioeconomic Status and the Oldest Old’s Health

This chapter studies the period and cohort variations when using socioeconomic status (SES) to predict Chinese oldest old’s health outcomes. SES is measured by educational attainments and whether frequently going to bed hungry in childhood. The results show that the oldest old who have higher educational attainments and seldom went to bed hungry have better health outcomes except for taking the chronic disease measure into consideration. The most important findings are the period and cohort variations in the linkage between SES and the oldest old’s health. In general, health of individuals with lower SES is more sensitive to cohort and period changes as compared to those with higher SES. The most significant period effect is shown by a dip when using each SES variable to estimate the respondent’s positive feeling scores. Again, this is likely to be caused by the economic hardship and Wenchuan earthquake that occurred in that year. Findings from this chapter echo results from previous analyses that SES has significant influence on the oldest old’s health. The findings also highlight the period and cohort effects in the link between SES and the oldest old’s health. The chapter emphasizes that social events have stronger influence on the oldest old’s subjective wellbeing than physical health. One limitation of the study is that the commonly used SES measure, income, is not studied because such information is not available in several earlier waves of the survey. Future research may develop more appropriate measures and investigate why such cohort and period effects have happened to improve this current research.