Socioeconomic Status and Health: A Micro-level Analysis of Exposure and Vulnerability to Daily Stressors

This study examines the interconnections among education—as a proxy for socioeconomic status—stress, and physical and mental health by specifying dif-ferential exposure and vulnerability models using data from The National Study of Daily Experiences (N = 1,031). These daily diary data allowed assessment of the social distribution of a qualitatively different type of stressor than has pre-viously been examined in sociological stress research—daily stressors, or has-sles. Moreover, these data allowed a less biased assessment of stress exposure and a more micro-level examination of the connections between stress and health by socioeconomic status. Consistent with the broad literature describing socioeconomic inequalities in physical and mental health, the results of this study indicated that, on any given day, better-educated adults reported fewer physical symptoms and less psychological distress. Although better educated individuals reported more daily stressors, stressors reported by those with less education were more severe. Finally, neither exposure nor vulnerability explained socioeconomic differentials in daily health, but the results clearly indicate that the stressor-health association cannot be considered independent of socioeconomic status. 1 Stress exposure and vulnerability play a cen-tral role in the sociological study of socioeco-nomic differentials in physical and mental health (Aneshensel 1992; Baum, Garofalo, and Yali 1999; Kessler 1979; Pearlin 1989). Individuals in lower socioeconomic groups shoulder a disproportionate amount of both acute and chronic stressful events (Turner and Lloyd 1999; Turner, Wheaton, and Lloyd 1995), and there is a well-established link between higher levels of stress and decreased physical and mental health (Cohen and Herber