Role of Socioeconomic Status

Saleem Bhathkal^*
*Correspondence: Dr. Saleem Bhathkal, Department of Economics, University of Karachi, Karachi, Pakistan, Email:

Description

Socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the major aspect influencing the health status of a nation. It is the measure of the social upright of the individual or a family and has a broad impact on an individual/family's health, educational attainment, diet, lifestyle, etc. The per capita revenue of citizens is a main aspect that decides the SES of the population. The affordability and utilization of the health services depend on the socioeconomic profile of the population. The constant changes in the consumer worth of goods globally as well as nationally due to increase warrants that it is fixed to constantly update the income-based socioeconomic scales so as the assessment is made correctly in practice. We are creating an attempt to arrange for an updated theory which builds the confidence for inflaming the economic status of the country. The SES is a vital factor influencing health, nutritional status, mortality, and morbidity of a population. SES also influences the acceptability, affordability, accessibility, and actual on ground utilization of various available health facilities. SES states to an individual's position with in a graded social structure, which is one of the significant factors influencing health status. In primary care settings, examinations of socioeconomic scales frequently reveal inequities in access to health care. It also exposes an outline to the health problems existing in an exact population with respect to their socioeconomic class. The two main areas that the SES helps to address are first, a disease pattern with low socioeconomic population presents more commonly with communicable diseases and nutritional deficiency while as the high SES shows more of obesity and noncommunicable diseases;second, the access to health care with high SES shows a better access. Thus, the SES aids in accepting the pattern of patients attending the primary care setting. Composite scales are commonly used to measure the SES, which has a combination of social and economic variables. Currently, we do not have a tool to directly measure the social status of an individual; therefore, an effort has been made time to time by many researchers and social scientists in the past to devise a composite index to measure it. However, instant social transformation and rapid-growing economy have rendered these scales ineffective in measuring the SES at present. Therefore, considering the current prosperous in inflative factors, they have been reviewed. The socioeconomic scales which consider income as the basis for its calculation need to be updated with the changes in All India Consumer Price Index regularly. This study investigated the most commonly used indicators of socioeconomic status in health research in relation to three health outcomes in old age. We also included a less traditional measure toughly associated with socioeconomic status (occupational complexity), and a composite measure based on several indicators of SES (the SES-index). The present study contributes to the literature by doing an in depth investigation of how the SES indicators relate to each other, and to late-life health, and by testing the predictive value of two novel measures of socioeconomic status.