| Income | Individual or household: monthly or annual; before taxes; equivalized (household income by household size)
Government or state welfare benefit support; food stamps
Absolute or relative poverty thresholds | Measures access to material resources (food, shelter, and culture) and access to services (health care, leisure or recreation activities, and education)
Relates to social standing or prestige
Reverse causality: health impacts on level of income
Context-specific: country, sex, age |
| Education | Educational attainment: highest level attained; qualifications; years completed; ISCED | Reflects early-life SES, usually stable across the life-course
Strong determinant of employment and income
Influences position in society or social networks
Affects access to health care or information
Determines values, cognitive decision-making, risk taking, behaviours, and life skills
Affects exposure to and ability to cope with stressors
Reverse causality: childhood poor health impacts on school attendance and attainment
Context-specific: country education system, age cohorts |
| Occupation | Employment or job history: longest, first, last; blue or white collar; manual or non-manual; “head of household”; RGSC; NS-SEC; European Socioeconomic Classification; American Census Classification; Wright’s Social Classification (Wright, 1997); Lombardi et al. Social Classification (Lombardi et al., 1988); Erikson and Goldthorpe Classification (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992); country-specific classifications; ISEI; SIOPS
Unemployment experience (ever or number of years)
Type of contract: salaried or hourly wage; part-time, full-time, or zero-hours; short- or long-term contract; job insecurity | Reflects social standing or prestige, working relations and conditions
Strong determinant of income
Based on educational attainment
Influences social networks, work-based stress, autonomy or control
Reflects occupational hazards, exposures, or demands
Excludes some groups (e.g. retired people, unpaid home workers or “housewives”, students, some self-employed)
Context-specific: country (level of industrialization or deindustrialization), age cohorts
Unemployment has particular impacts on social exclusion and income, poverty, and access to health care
Reverse causality: health impacts on (un)employment |
| Wealth | Assets (total or specific): land, property, livestock; housing tenure; ownership of car, refrigerator, television, etc.; DHS; FAS | Reflects material aspect of socioeconomic circumstances
Relates to income
Context-specific: country, rural or urban
Reverse causality: health impacts ability to accumulate wealth |
| Housing | Housing quality or conditions: overcrowding (number of residents per number of rooms); dampness; housing type; water and sanitation | Direct impact: exposures for specific diseases
Relates to material circumstances
Context-specific: country development
Reverse causality: health impacts on money available to spend on housing |
| Compositional | Combinations of SES metrics: education or income (study-specific); income and wealth (FAS); WAMI
Historic indicators: Hollingshead index of social position; Duncan index; Nam–Powers socioeconomic status; Warner’s index of status characteristics | Attempts to capture multiple dimensions of SES; however, composite indicators perhaps mask specific relationships and mechanisms which individual SES measurements provide |
| Childhood SES | Parental SES: parental (father’s or mother’s) occupation; household income or conditions; child-related benefits (e.g. entitlement to free school meals)
Educational attainment (end of childhood or early years) | Used in life-course SES analyses to capture childhood socioeconomic circumstances |
| Subjective SES | Self-identification, comparison, or satisfaction: self-identification as upper, middle, or lower class; comparison of income with others; satisfaction with income; MacArthur Scales of subjective social status | Individual’s perception of his or her socioeconomic standing
Relates to objective indicators of SES
Could be part of psychosocial pathway of health inequalities |
| Social capital | Social support, inclusion, or exclusion: more than 100 tools identified in recent systematic review (25 with validated psychometric elements; Cordier et al., 2017); CAMSIS | Commonly measures domains of connectedness, community participation, and citizenship; no single instrument measures all aspects within the three domains of social inclusion
Hierarchical social interactions reflect social and material advantage; conversely, social exclusion from social and community life can result from economic deprivation and low SES |
