Socioeconomic Status, Social Networks And Health Inequality

The impact of socioeconomic status on health inequalities is an important area for scholars who concern social stratification. And the class differences in social network have been discussed in the trends which combine stratification analysis and social networks analysis. Although the existing documents have concerned the impacts of socioeconomic status or the impacts of social networks on individual health respectively, there is no combination of both and they don’t come to the mechanism of social status and social networks.Based on the CGSS2008data, this study analyzed socioeconomic status and social networks together. It applied the Logistic Regression Model to analyze the respective impact of socioeconomic status and social networks on individual health. And it applied the OLS Linear Regression Model to analyze the impact of socioeconomic status on social networks. The Regression analysis showed that socioeconomic status, especially income and education level, has significantly impacts on self-rated health:the higher the socioeconomic, the higher probability of a good self-rated health; the health inequalities did exist; Lower density and higher heterogeneity of social networks has positives impact on individual health; socioeconomic status can affect the formation of social networks which in favor of maintaining the good health.On the basis of the Regression analysis, as an important complementary part to the existing documents, this study used the method of successively test in the Mediating Effect Analysis to test the mediating effecet of social networks. This study demonstrates a more complete picture:social networks as a mediating variable, was one of the mechanisms affecting the socio-economic status of the individual self-rated health.