Abstract

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Europe is at a historical point in educational history. The rise of the knowledge society and the worldwide expansion of higher education has brought education – as an indicator of personal competence – to the fore. With the upcoming of the meritocratic society, social status has become increasingly dependent upon an individual’s level of education. Given these trends, it is not surprising that education is at the heart of social stratification theories. In recent decades, scholars view education as the pivot in determining subsequent life chances. Arguably, one of the most important themes at the intersection of sociology and epidemiology is the role of education in generating and reproducing health inequalities. As in the rest of the world, a positive relationship between education and health has consistently been demonstrated across European countries. In general, people with higher qualifications have been found to report higher levels of perceived health, less psychological distress, higher life expectancy, and a lower incidence of disease than is the case for their counterparts with less education. The demonstration of the persistent (or even increasing) impact of education on health emphasizes the need for a better understanding of this connection. Hitherto, many studies have already been carried out on the individual pathways that link education to health. Extant theory proposes that education shapes health by influencing people’s accumulated knowledge, material belongings, social-psychological resources, and behavior factors (i.e., social causation mechanisms). Research also recognizes the reverse causal direction, in that individuals who experience poor health in childhood are less likely to attain tertiary levels of education (i.e., social selection mechanisms). Another literature documents the role of omitted third variables such as social and genetic endowments (i.e., spurious mechanisms).

This session invites papers that take the above-described research lines a step further and that help to build an inclusive society. As such, we encourage contributions from different theoretical, analytical, and methodological perspectives that are related to the following issues:

(1) The magnitude of the education-health relationship across population subgroups. This includes considerations of age differences, gender differences, social background differences, and/or race differences, among others. In this respect, theories such as the theory of resource substitution or the theory of cumulative (dis)advantage may be of great importance;

(2) The magnitude of the education-health relationship across different countries. The leading question here should be: ‘Which institutional factors exert an impact on the association between education and health?’ Using theories from broader disciplines, attention can be paid to the influence of healthcare systems, labor market policies, the organization of marriage markets, and institutional arrangements in education themselves, among others;

(3) The magnitude of the education-health relationship across different time periods. Of interest in this respect is the theory of the rising importance of education, the massive expansion in higher-education, and the apparent reality of credential inflation, among others.

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Session organizer(s)

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Katrijn Delaruelle (BE) – is a PhD student at the Sociology Department of Ghent University, Belgium. The aim of her PhD is to adopt an institutional perspective on educational inequalities in health across European countries and cohorts. Using data of the European Social Survey, she focuses among others on the impact of the worldwide expansion of tertiary education, cross-national differences in educational systems, and the reversed gender gap in education.

 

Piet Bracke (BE) – is a professor in the Sociology Department of Ghent University, Belgium. His research interests include gender issues and the sociology of the family, epidemiological sociology from a comparative perspective, mental health, and mental health services. He and his collaborators are eager to contribute to the further development of institutional theories of population (mental) health.

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