Socioeconomic mortality differentials in men and women according to own and spouse's characteristics in Finland

Abstract This paper compares the magnitude of differences in mortality according to own and spouse's socioeconomic characteristics and assesses the importance of cross‐classifying these characteristics. The analysis covers all 35–64 year‐old married Finnish men and women in the period 1981–85. Relative mortality rates were obtained from Poisson regression models. The analysis shows that socioeconomic mortality differentials within each sex are more or less equally large according to both own and spouse's education or occupational characteristics for a wide range of causes of death. Moreover, among both women and men cross‐classifications between own and spouse's socioeconomic status do not indicate important mortality differentials over and above those already displayed by its two separate parts, i.e. there were no important interactions between own and spouse's socioeconomic characteristics. The results call into question the argument that the mortality of married women should be analysed on the basis of their husband's socioeconomic characteristics because these characteristics better describe both spouses' socioeconomic standing and are thus more powerful predictors of men's and women's mortality than women's socioeconomic characteristics. It is further concluded that the advantages of cross‐classifying both spouses' socioeconomic characteristics in mortality analysis are very limited when these characteristics do not interact with each other. Moreover, cause‐specific comparisons between men and women showed that married women's mortality differentials by own educational as well as occupational status were roughly as large as those obtained for men. The larger total mortality differentials among men than women are mainly due to cause of death structure.