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Title: Dynamic and Dyadic Relationships: An Extension of the Socioeconomic Status-Health Relationship
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Garbarski, Dana
Dynamic and Dyadic Relationships: An Extension of the Socioeconomic Status-Health Relationship
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): Children, Illness; Health, Chronic Conditions; Health/Health Status/SF-12 Scale; Labor Force Participation; Modeling, Growth Curve/Latent Trajectory Analysis; Mothers, Health; Poverty; Socioeconomic Factors; Socioeconomic Status (SES)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The prevalence of childhood chronic conditions has substantially increased over the last several decades, shifting the focus from survival to improving quality of life for children and their families. This dissertation draws attention to the importance of focusing on individual lives as linked lives when investigating stratification in health and socioeconomic outcomes, where the health and socioeconomic experiences of one family member are potentially formative life events for other members of the family.

While many studies use parental socioeconomic status and health to predict in part their children's future prospects, the first empirical chapter investigates the dynamic relationship of child health with maternal health and socioeconomic factors over time. Using a series of latent growth curve models, this study examines the association between trajectories--or intra-individual models of stability and change--of child activity limitations and trajectories of maternal limitations in work due to health, labor force participation and household poverty status. The second analytic chapter examines and accounts for potential methodological biases in the relationship of child health with maternal health and socioeconomic factors in three ways: autoregressive cross-lagged models that address the reciprocal relationship between child health and maternal outcomes, fixed effects analyses that control for individual characteristics that are constant over time to limit omitted variable bias, and a latent class analysis to address in part both omitted variable bias and measurement error. The third analytic chapter examines the concordance of mothers' and children's reports of children's general health status, the concurrent validity of both mothers' and children's reports of children's general health status, and whether the association between child and maternal health depends on who reports children's health status.

This dissertation unifies research on stratification in socioeconomic and health outcomes with the life course and stress process perspectives, by pushing traditional stratification research to take seriously the idea that individual lives are linked lives and applying unique methodological approaches that account for the linked lives of mothers and children at the point in the life course when the child lives at home.

Bibliography Citation
Garbarski, Dana. Dynamic and Dyadic Relationships: An Extension of the Socioeconomic Status-Health Relationship. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012.