Federal government websites often end in. The site is secure. Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October Learn More or Try it out now. To our knowledge, no prior studies have examined the association of SSS and health in Angola.
Subjective socioeconomic measures may provide a rapid assessment of a relevant social status construct, important for studying health inequalities. In this study, we addressed social determinants of health by examining the relationship between the subjective and objective social status, reported health and healthcare-seeking behaviour. We tested the application of the MacArthur scale as a measure of SSS in a developing setting, in a sample of 12, households.
First, we investigated its relation to objective socioeconomic indicators, and then we explored how subjective and objective social status associate with health reported needs and health-seeking behaviour of the surveyed population.
Logistic regression was used to examine the influence of subjective perception of status in self-reported health and health-seeking behaviour. Our findings suggest that the SSS follows a gradient distribution obtained with more objective socioeconomic indicators. Additionally, we found that subjective perception of status influence health needs reporting and health-seeking behaviour and its significant effect remained after controlling for the objective socioeconomic markers.
It is also an easier alternative to traditional measures such as income, usually difficult to measure in developing settings. The social perception of status should be considered as a complement with objective indicators when exploring social determinants of health. The online version contains supplementary material available at Indeed, in health science literature, it is well established that SES is a compelling determinant of morbidity, mortality, and self-rated health [ 9 — 12 ].
