Journal of Health and Social Behavior最新文献

Patient autonomy, or the right to make decisions about medical care, is usually examined either within clinical encounters with medical providers or outside of clinics via social movements to transform care. These perspectives, however, may miss how patients exercise autonomy outside of clinical encounters while remaining in conventional care. Through in-depth interviews with 61 people who pursued fertility treatment in New York City, this article argues that one important way that people exert autonomy in consumer medicine is by switching clinics. This study finds that nearly half of participants switched clinics to reorient their patient careers that were not progressing satisfactorily, attempting to reset, redirect, and escalate them. This article emphasizes that patients exercise autonomy not just over treatment decisions but also over the direction and progress of patient careers themselves. This article suggests that patients' disparate opportunities to elect to switch medical practices represents an inequity in consumer medicine.

Time spent working or caring for children may reduce the time available for undertaking time-intensive health behaviors. We test competing perspectives about how work hours and the number of children of specific ages will be associated with married or cohabiting men's and women's sleep duration and physical activity. We use data from the 2004 to 2017 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (N = 154,580). In support of the "time availability" perspective, longer work hours and children of any age are associated with shorter sleep hours. However, in support of the "time deepening" perspective, additional hours of work beyond 40 hours per week and children over the age of five are not associated with reduced physical activity. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find gender differences in support of our theories. Our results suggest that the economy of time works differently for sleep and exercise.

Using cross-national data containing information on the status rank of network alters, this study investigates the potential negative effects of "upward status heterophily," ties to and perceived interaction with higher status others. According to our main finding, upward status heterophily is associated with poor physical health and lower subjective well-being. We also find that this focal relationship varies across individual and contextual moderators. For subjective well-being only, it is weaker among people who are better educated, have larger nonkin network, and possess greater self-efficacy. Moreover, there is a significant cross-level interaction: For both health outcomes, the relationship is more pronounced in subnational regions that are economically more unequal. Our findings shed light on the mechanisms of the "dark side of social capital" by operationalizing perceived status differential as a proxy for upward social comparison and showing its deleterious consequences in the East Asian context.

Extant research has established that low-wage workers of color are at higher risk for occupational exposures. While the medical sociology literature regarding contested illness provides insights into the dynamics surrounding workplace exposures, some environmental illnesses such as lupus have gotten scant analytical attention. This is a significant gap because women of color, who are more likely to hold these high-risk jobs, are disproportionately affected by the disease. We examine a case of pesticide exposure among Black women farmworkers in Florida. We investigate how race and occupation intersect to shape lived experiences with toxics and what role race plays in the process of contesting exposures and illness. Our data include in-depth interviews (N = 36), media coverage, and archival materials. Our findings indicate that race-related factors played an important part in shaping the farmworkers' experiences with exposures, illness, and interaction with elite actors.

The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a massive turn to remote work, followed by subsequent shifts for many into hybrid or fully returning to the office. To understand the patterned dynamics of subjective well-being associated with shifting places of work, we conducted a nationally representative panel survey (October 2020 and April 2021) of U.S. employees who worked remotely at some point since the pandemic (N = 1,817). Cluster analysis identified four patterned constellations of well-being based on burnout, work-life conflict, and job and life satisfaction. A total return to office is generally more stressful, leading to significantly lower probabilities of being in the optimal low stress/high satisfaction constellation by Wave 2, especially for men and women without care obligations. Remote and hybrid arrangements have salutary effects; moving to hybrid is especially positive for minority men and less educated men, although it disadvantages White women's well-being.

Studies of the relationship between income inequality and life expectancy often speculate about the role of policy, but direct empirical research is limited. Drawing on the neo-materialist perspective, we examine whether the longitudinal association between income inequality and life expectancy is mediated and moderated by policy liberalism in U.S. states (2000-2014). More liberal policy contexts are characterized by greater efforts to regulate the economy, redistribute income, and protect vulnerable groups and lesser efforts to penalize deviant social behavior. We find that state-level income inequality is inversely associated with policy liberalism and life expectancy. The association between income inequality and life expectancy was not mediated by policy liberalism but was moderated by it. The association is attenuated in states with more liberal policy contexts, supporting the neo-materialist perspective. This finding illustrates how states like New York and California (with liberal policy contexts) can exhibit high income inequality and high life expectancy.

Relying on in-depth interviews and ethnographic data in Los Angeles, California, this study examines the health experiences of unaccompanied, undocumented Latin American-origin immigrant youth as they come of age as low-wage workers. Findings demonstrate that unaccompanied, undocumented youth undergo cumulative physical and mental health disadvantages in the United States's secondary labor market and during critical developmental life stages while lacking the parental monitoring and guidance to navigate them. Developing comparisons between their past and present living conditions and between themselves and other youth in Los Angeles-what I refer to as an emergent frame of reference-youth workers come to perceive family disruptions, and especially separation from their parents, as the most salient factor affecting their health. While some youth ultimately resign themselves to short-term attempts to assuage illness, injury, or distress through activities like substance abuse, others pursue community connections and support groups that can sustain them long term.

Increasing evidence points to the salience of early life experiences in shaping health inequalities, but scant research has considered the role of institutional resources as buffers in this relationship. Health care systems in particular are an understudied yet important context for the generation of inequalities from childhood into adulthood. This research investigates associations between childhood disadvantage and adult morbidity and examines the role of health care system quality in this relationship. We also consider the role of adult socioeconomic status. We merge individual-level data on major disease (2014 European Social Survey) with nation-level health care indicators. Results across subjective and objective approaches to health care system quality are similar, indicating a reduced association between childhood socioeconomic status and adult disease in countries with higher quality health care. In total, our results reiterate the long-term influence of childhood disadvantage on health while suggesting health care's specific role as an institutional resource for ameliorating life course health inequalities.

Parents with better-educated children are healthier and live longer, but whether there is a causal effect of children's education on their parents' health and longevity is unclear. First, we demonstrate an association between adults' offspring education and parental mortality in the 1958 British birth cohort study, which remains substantial-about two additional years of life-even when comparing parents with similar socioeconomic status. Second, we use the 1972 educational reform in England and Wales, which increased the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years, to identify the presence of a causal effect of children's education on parental health and longevity using census-linked data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study. Results reveal that children's education has no causal effects on a wide range of parental mortality and health outcomes. We interpret these findings discussing the role of universal health care and education for socioeconomic inequality in Great Britain.