The Relationship between Lifetime Health Trajectories and Socioeconomic Attainment in Middle Age

Dohoon Lee, New York University (NYU)
Margot Jackson, Brown University

A growing body of literature has demonstrated the importance of temporal patterns of health status to socioeconomic attainment. However, most previous studies focus on only one temporal dimension of health disadvantage—timing, duration, stability, or sequencing—and rarely provide a proper test of the health selection and social causation hypotheses. Using data from the British National Child Development Study, we examine the association between lifetime health trajectories and socioeconomic attainment in middle age. This study applies finite mixture modeling to identify distinct trajectories of health status, such that individuals in the same trajectory experience a similar health history. We further employ propensity score weighting models to account for the presence of time-varying socioeconomic factors in estimating the effects of health trajectories. This study will assess the extent to which socioeconomic attainment in middle age varies by differences in the timing, duration, stability, and sequence of health disadvantage over the life course.