Socioeconomic Status In Sociology

Socioeconomic status is frequently considered to be a potential confounder or a risk factor for overweight and obesity in health studies. Although there is general agreement that SES is a multidimensional construct, scholars tend to include only one socioeconomic status component in their predictive models and few researches have provided an explicit theoretical and methodological rationale for the choice of indicators (Ball et al., 2002).

Socioeconomic status is a measure of an individual’s position within society that is determined by the access to collectively desired resources (Oakes and Rossi, 2003). The SES concept has emerged from the class approach to social structure analysis, primarily developed by Karl Marx and Max Weber, and consequently

Status, or prestige, refers to the likelihood of life chances to be determined by socially honoured nonmaterial factors (Weber, 2009), such as ancestry, level of education, fame or physical attractiveness. Party is linked to a political context and serves as a proxy of power. Similarly to Marx, Weber considered the possession of material resources (class) as the third component of social position, that could affect the quality of life. Thus, Weber developed multidimensional model for social structure analysis that could depict various aspects of

occupation, education and income) that represent different facets of the construct (Ball et al., 2002). Occupation is commonly used as a single reliable measure of SES in industrial societies. Since occupations are ranked by prestige and vary according to the degree of profitability, the indicator is conceptualized as part of Weber 's class and status domains (Liberato et al., 1988). Education is used as a proxy of status as knowledge acquired could influence individual’s lifestyle and behaviour. Income and wealth fall into Weber’s class domain and directly affect the amount of material resources and indirectly affect lifestyle and access to power. Thus, SES incorporates conceptually distinct components of social reality which may differently impact on obesity.

Empirical studies on the topic revealed that in developed countries SES is negatively correlated with overweight and obesity in adult females (Kahn et al., 1991; Bernstein et al., 1996; Lahmann et al., 2000), and less consistently in adult males (Sobal and Stunkard, 1989; Kahn and Williamson, 1991; Martikainen and Marmot, 1999) and children (Gnavi et al., 2000; Power, 2005; Costa-Font and Gil, 2013). Furthermore, obesity is differently associated with various indices of SES for women and men (Ball et al.,