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Is social origin, destination or mobility what matters to adult self‐rated oral health?
Author(s) -
Miranda Gabriela,
Bernabé Eduardo,
DelgadoAngulo Elsa Karina
Publication year - 2023
Publication title -
community dentistry and oral epidemiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.061
H-Index - 101
eISSN - 1600-0528
pISSN - 0301-5661
DOI - 10.1111/cdoe.12728
Subject(s) - medicine , social mobility , socioeconomic status , demography , residence , social class , odds , ethnic group , cohort , logistic regression , population , environmental health , social science , sociology , political science , anthropology , law
Abstract Objectives To evaluate the independent contributions of parental socioeconomic position (SEP), own SEP and social mobility to explain adult self‐rated oral health. Methods Data from 6633 participants in the 1970 British Cohort Study were analysed. Parental SEP at the age of 10 years (social origin) and own SEP at the age of 46 years (social destination) were indicated by the 7‐class National Statistics Socioeconomic Classification (NS‐SEC). The study outcome was self‐rated oral health (SROH) at the age of 46 years. Diagonal reference models (DRMs) were used to parse out the effects of parental SEP, own SEP and intergenerational mobility from childhood to middle adulthood, after adjusting for demographic characteristics (sex, ethnicity, country and area of residence). Results Overall, 23.1% of participants reported poor SROH. A baseline DRM, with no indicators of social mobility, showed that the contribution of own SEP to explain variations in SROH was higher than that of parental SEP. However, they became almost equal after indicators of social mobility were introduced. Downward mobility was associated with poor SROH (odds ratio: 1.24, 95% CI: 1.01–1.51), but upward mobility was not (1.01, 95% CI: 0.83–1.23). Also, short‐range downward mobility and long‐range downward mobility (moving 1 and 2+ social classes down in NS‐SEC, respectively) were associated with poor SROH (1.26, 95% CI: 1.01–1.58 and 1.39, 95% CI: 1.06–1.83, respectively) whilst short‐range upward mobility (1.04, 95% CI: 0.84–1.28) and long‐range upward mobility (0.88, 95% CI: 0.67–1.14) were not. Conclusions The contributions of parental and own SEP were similar once social mobility was accounted for. Only downward mobility was associated with poor SROH, with new evidence that long‐range mobility was more strongly associated with poor SROH than short‐range mobility.