The correlation between intragenerational subjective social mobility and health: a scoping review

Health and socioeconomic status (SES) are interrelated. Social mobility—a key concept in studying this relationship—is intra-generational mobility, where individuals are compared to their own past SES. This is a scoping review evaluating the effects of intra-generational social mobility especially downward mobility on health and health behaviors. All English studies released after 1995 that report the effect of social mobility on health or health behaviors were included. Most of the studies evaluate mortality, mental disorders, physical diseases, and health behaviors as a health variable and use occupational class as a factor for determining social mobility. A significant number of studies stated that social mobility affects health and downward mobile people had worse health than stable high groups. However, some studies deny these effects. Several studies have examined the models and theories that show the relationship between health and social mobility including social causation, health selection, accumulation of disadvantages, and etc. Among the studies that investigated the models and theories justifying the relationship between health and social mobility, it seems that the social causation model and the accumulation of disadvantages model have more acceptance than the others.