Household item ownership and self-rated health: material and psychosocial explanations

Pikhart, Hynek and Bobak, Martin and Rose, Richard and Marmot, Michael (2003) Household item ownership and self-rated health: material and psychosocial explanations. BMC Public Health, 3 (38). ISSN 1471-2458

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Abstract

There has been an ongoing debate whether the effects of socioeconomic factors on health are due to absolute poverty and material factors or to relative deprivation and psychosocial factors. In the present analyses, we examined the importance for health of material factors, which may have a direct effect on health, and of those that may affect health indirectly, through psychosocial mechanisms. The overall prevalence of poor or very poor health was 13% in Poland and 25% in Hungary. Education, material deprivation and the number of household items were all associated with poor health in bivariate analyses. All three groups of household items were positively related to self-rated health in age-adjusted analyses. The relation of basic needs items to poor health disappeared after controlling for other socioeconomic variables (mainly material deprivation). The relation of socially oriented and luxury items to poor health, however, persisted in multivariate models. The results were similar in both datasets.

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