Accumulation, health and health inequalities. The importance of life course processes and risk profiles

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matthias Richter
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: from 2014 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 258408917

Knowledge about the causes of health inequalities is still limited. Thus, material, psychosocial and behavioural factors as well as different life course processes were studied separately and jointly in the predecessor project. We were able to confirm the relevance of these single factors and processes and to show that the joint analysis provided innovative findings. Hereby, accumulation processes have proven to be a key mechanism behind health inequalities. Until now, they have not been widely studied in distinction to adaption processes. Furthermore, an examination of possible “risk profiles” is lacking, which result in a simultaneous exposure to multiple (dis-)advantageous factors. The overall aim of the follow-up project is to investigate the importance of accumulation processes in the generation of health inequalities by including material, psychosocial and behavioural factors in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. The project will address the following research questions: 1. How do the health effects of exposure to material and psychosocial factors change with duration of exposition (longitudinal perspective)? 2. To what extent does the relative importance of accumulation and adaption processes vary between socioeconomic status groups and life phases and do these differences contribute to the explanation of health inequalities? 3. Which risk profiles with specific combinations of intermediate factors can be identified for Germany from (cross-sectional perspective)?4. To what extent do these risk profiles differ with regard to gender and age and how are they associated with health and health inequalities? The analyses will be based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel using the years 1994 to 2017. Fixed effects-regressions will be used to analyse the importance of accumulation and adaption processes for the explanation of health inequalities. The determination of the risk profiles will be carried out using Latent-Class-Analysis, extracting specific patterns of clustered explaining factors. This project will provide new insights on the mechanisms behind the emergence of health inequalities. By simultaneously considering life course processes and explaining factors, the nationally and internationally existing gap in analysing health inequalities will be met.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Anja Knöchelmann