Relational Social Class, Self-Rated Health, and Mortality in the United States

Abstract Applying a relational class theory based on property ownership, authority, and credentials/skill, we analyzed the relationship between class, self-rated health (SRH), and mortality using the 1972–2016 General Social Survey. In a simple measure of class, we assigned respondents to worker, manager, petty bourgeois, or capitalist classes. In a complex measure, we subdivided workers (less-skilled/more-skilled), managers (low/high), and capitalists (small/large). Next, we estimated trends in class structure.

“The Serpent of Their Agonies”: Exploitation As Structural Determinant of Mental Illness

Abstract Background: Social stratification is a well-documented determinant of mental health. Traditional measures of stratification (e.g., socioeconomic status) reduce dynamic social processes to individual attributes downstream of mechanisms that generate stratification. In this study, we measure one process theorized to generate and reproduce social stratification—economic exploitation—and explore its association with mental health. Methods: Data are from the 1983 to 2017 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a nationally representative cohort study (base- line N = 3059).

Mental Illness, Drinking, and the Social Division and Structure of Labor in the United States: 2003-2015

Abstract BACKGROUND: We draw on a relational theoretical perspective to investigate how the social division and structure of labor are associated with serious and moderate mental illness and binge and heavy drinking. METHODS: The Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Occupational Information Network were linked to explore how occupation, the productivity-to-pay gap, unemployment, the gendered division of domestic labor, and factor-analytic and theory-derived dimensions of work are related to mental illness and drinking outcomes.

Anxious? Depressed? You Might Be Suffering from Capitalism: Contradictory Class Locations and the Prevalence of Depression and Anxiety in the USA

Abstract Despite a well-established social gradient for many mental disorders, there is evidence that individuals near the middle of the social hierarchy suffer higher rates of depression and anxiety than those at the top or bottom. Although prevailing indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) cannot detect or easily explain such patterns, relational theories of social class, which emphasise political-economic processes and dimensions of power, might. We test whether the relational construct of contradictory class location, which embodies aspects of both ownership and labour, can explain this nonlinear pattern.

Two Decades of Neo-Marxist Class Analysis and Health Inequalities: A Critical Reconstruction

Abstract Most population health researchers conceptualize social class as a set of attributes and material conditions of life of individuals. The empiricist tradition of ‘class as an individual attribute’ equates class to an ‘observation’, precluding the investigation of unobservable social mechanisms. Another consequence of this view of social class is that it cannot be conceptualized, measured, or intervened upon at the meso- or macro levels, being reduced to a personal attribute.