Tackling the health gap: The role of psychosocial processes

• Main Authors: ADLER, Nancy E., TAN, Jacinth J. X.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Social Psychology; Social Psychology and Interaction
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2743; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4000/viewcontent/tackling_health_gap.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In The Health Gap, Michael Marmot describes how, starting even before birth, social conditions set individuals on trajectories that eventuate in inequities in health and longevity. In addition to race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status linked to income and education plays a major role in determining health trajectories. The effects emerge not only at the very bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum, but across the whole range.1 The fact that health effects persist at levels where resources are more than adequate to fulfill material needs suggests that the health gap is not due only to material privation associated with poverty, but also to social processes created by relative disadvantage. Given this, understanding and addressing the experience of relative deprivation is needed along with tackling adversities of material deprivation.