Dean of the College and Sociology Program Present

Facts Do Care About Your Feelings: Subjective Socioeconomic Status and Pain Over the Life Course

Pain is rising in the United States and globally—an alarming trend with wide-reaching implications given that pain serves as a “barometer” for population health and well-being. These increases are not evenly distributed: pain reflects and exacerbates existing inequalities, including by socioeconomic status. While literature has established socioeconomic inequalities in pain trends, little is known about how perceptions of socioeconomic status, rather than objective or relative access to resources, contribute to these inequalities. Such distinctions matter given that internalizations of status do not necessarily align with material conditions yet can affect our health through various psychosocial mechanisms. Using Health and Retirement Study panel data from 2004 to 2018, I use conditional, quadratic growth models to find that feeling worse off—regardless of one’s socioeconomic reality—is associated with worse health. Perceptions of lower SES and perceived declines in status are significantly associated with more pain, even after accounting for objective and relative SES. These results demonstrate that subjective socioeconomic status matters for health beyond access to resources, underscoring the importance of perceptions in shaping health realities and highlighting subjective SES as an underexplored mechanism explaining the persistence of health inequalities.

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Terresa Eun is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Stanford University. As a sociologist and social demographer, she studies how social determinants of health shape and are shaped by structural inequalities, particularly by race, class, and gender. Her research to date examines the lived experience and distribution of physical pain, the relationship between law enforcement and health, and the implementation of public health interventions. Across these substantive domains, she investigates how our perceptions shape our social realities, how conceptual categories can obscure underlying heterogeneity, and how discretion enters decision-making processes. Her work has been supported by various grants and fellowships, including a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute T32 training grant, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals at the intersection of social science and medicine.

For more information, call 845-758-6822.

Time: 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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