The De Jong Lecture in Social Demography
Social Class Health and Mortality Differentials: Are There Important Selection Effects?
The 2nd annual De Jong Lecture was held October 22, 2007.
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Alberto Palloni, Ph.D., Board of Trustees Professor in Sociology and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, was the featured speaker.
Dr. Palloni discussed the role of an important conjecture that is purported to explain the persistent, large, and ubiquitous disparities in health and mortality by social class. These disparities have most often been attributed to properties or endowments of the social classes that individuals occupy even though the exact mechanisms that make this possible remain largely unidentified. An alternative way to explain health and mortality differentials by social class is to invoke the existence of selection. Selection attributes, at least partially, the observed health and mortality differentials by social class to one (or several) mechanism(s) through which individuals who are in poor health to begin with are unable to accede to top positions in the social class hierarchy or, alternatively, through which individuals who have better health to begin with are better equipped to succeed and end up in the top strata of the hierarchy.
Dr. Palloni's lecture examined the nature of this conjecture and identified the conditions necessary for its validity, and established the types of empirical evidence that one should marshal to prove the existence of selection mechanisms and delve into the empirical estimation of selection effects.
Duane F. Alwin, Director of Penn State's Center on Population Health and Aging, and the Tracy Winfree and Ted H. McCourtney Professor of Sociology and Demography, and Dalton Conley, University Professor of the Social Sciences and Chair of Sociology at New York University were discussants.
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