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Lifespan Variation by Occupational Class: Compression or Stagnation Over Time?

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Demography

Abstract

Cross-sectional analyses of adult lifespan variation have found an inverse association between socioeconomic position and lifespan variation, but the trends by social class are unknown. We investigated trends in lifespan variation over four decades (1971–2010) by occupational social class (manual, lower nonmanual, upper nonmanual, other) using Finnish register data. We performed age and cause-of-death decompositions of lifespan variation for each sex (a) by occupational class over time and (b) between occupational classes at a shared level of life expectancy. Although life expectancy increased in all classes, lifespan variation was stable among manual workers and decreased only among nonmanual classes. These differences were caused by early-adult mortality: older-age lifespan variation declined for all the classes, but variation in early-adult mortality increased for all classes except the highest. The manual class’s high and stagnant lifespan variation was driven by declines in circulatory diseases that were equally spread over early mortality-compressing and older mortality-expanding ages, as well as by high early-adult mortality from external causes. Results were similar for men and women. The results of this study, which is the first to document trends in lifespan variation by social class, suggest that mortality compression is compatible with increasing life expectancy but currently achieved only by higher occupational classes.

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Notes

  1. Generally, higher-status individuals have lower mortality, but in some populations, a reverse gradient has been observed (Rosero-Bixby and Dow 2009).

  2. Lifespan variation goes by many different names and is also called mortality compression/expansion, (de-)rectangularization of the survival curve, and variation or inequality in age at death or length of life.

  3. We refer here to the successful fight against cardiovascular diseases which has been the major source of life expectancy improvement in western countries since the 1970s (Vallin and Meslé 2004).

  4. For example, in the 1990s and early 2000s, only about 12 % of women aged 30–35 were household workers (Haataja 2006).

  5. Details are found online (http://www.stat.fi/til/ksyyt/2005/ksyyt_2005_2006-10-31_luo_002_en.html)

  6. Confidence intervals were estimated by bootstrapping using Monte Carlo simulation methods, assuming a binomial distribution of death counts.

  7. These calculations were also performed for each period. For notational simplicity, we dropped the subscript t denoting time.

  8. However, this definition also means that early-adult deaths are different across social groups within a country so that some deaths that are considered old-age among the lower social classes are early-adult among the upper classes. Thus, we consider “early-adult mortality” to be a technical definition and not to have any normative meaning.

  9. Small differences can arise when choosing to replace m i x with m i x  ′, or vice versa. Thus, we performed the same procedure in reverse and averaged the elementary contributions from each age and cause, as suggested by Shkolnikov et al. (2011).

  10. Males: upper nonmanual (1976–1980) e 31 = 43.1 years, e †31 = 10.0; manual workers (2001–2005), e 31 = 43.3 years, e †31 = 10.9. Females: upper nonmanual (1981–1986) e 31 = 50.2, e †31 = 8.7; manual workers (2001–2005) e 31 = 50.4 years, e †31 = 9.1

  11. Bars above the zero line before the threshold age signify that mortality from that age and cause of death was higher among manual workers than nonmanual workers. Bars above the zero line after the threshold age signify that mortality from that age and cause of death was lower among manual workers than nonmanual workers.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Max Planck Society and the Academy of Finland. We thank Riina Peltonen for help with setting up the data. We are grateful to Statistics Finland for making the data available to us. The study was approved by the ethics committee of the data provider. We also thank Carlo G. Camarda, Emilio Zagheni, and our reviewers at Demography for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

    Alyson A. van Raalte

  2. Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    Mikko Myrskylä

  3. Population Research Unit, Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Pekka Martikainen

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  1. Alyson A. van Raalte
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  2. Pekka Martikainen
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Correspondence to Alyson A. van Raalte.

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van Raalte, A.A., Martikainen, P. & Myrskylä, M. Lifespan Variation by Occupational Class: Compression or Stagnation Over Time?. Demography 51, 73–95 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0253-x

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