Why does income relate to depressive symptoms? Testing the income rank hypothesis longitudinally

Hounkpatin, Hilda Osafo, Wood, Alex M. ORCID: 0000-0002-8010-1455, Brown, Gordon D. A. and Dunn, Graham (2015) Why does income relate to depressive symptoms? Testing the income rank hypothesis longitudinally. Social Indicators Research, 124 (2). 637 - 655. ISSN 0303-8300

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Abstract

This paper reports a test of the relative income rank hypothesis of depression, according to which it is the rank position of an individual’s income amongst a comparison group, rather than the individual’s absolute income, that will be associated with depressive symptoms. A new methodology is developed to test between psychosocial and material explanations of why income relates to well-being. This method was used to test the income rank hypothesis as applied to depressive symptoms. We used data from a cohort of 10,317 individuals living in Wisconsin who completed surveys in 1992 and 2003. The utility assumed to arise from income was represented with a constant relative risk aversion function to overcome limitations of previous work in which inadequate specification of the relationship between absolute income and well-being may have inappropriately favoured relative income specifications. We compared models in which current and future depressive symptoms were predicted from: (a) income utility alone, (b) income rank alone, (c) the transformed difference between the individual’s income and the mean income of a comparison group and (d) income utility, income rank and distance from the mean jointly. Model comparison overcomes problems involving multi-collinearity amongst the predictors. A rank-only model was consistently supported. Similar results were obtained for the association between depressive symptoms and wealth and rank of wealth in a cohort of 32,900 British individuals who completed surveys in 2002 and 2008. We conclude that it is the rank of a person’s income or wealth within a social comparison group, rather than income or wealth themselves or their deviations from the mean within a reference group, that is more strongly associated with depressive symptoms.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.springer.com/journal/11205
Additional Information:	© 2014 The Authors
Divisions:	Psychological and Behavioural Science
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Date Deposited:	06 Dec 2019 14:21
Last Modified:	20 Jun 2024 19:42
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/102817

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