“Feeling Poor”: Perceived Economic Position and Environmental Mastery among Older Americans

Across the life course, environmental mastery is an important determinant of health (Pearlin & Schooler, 1978; Pudrovska, Schieman, Pearlin, & Nguyen, 2005; Surtees, Wainwright, Luben, Khaw, & Day, 2006) as well as an indicator of well-being in and of itself (Ryff & Keyes, 1995). Environmental mastery (or simply “mastery”) reflects an individual’s beliefs about his or her ability to control and manage important life circumstances (Pearlin, Nguyen, Schieman, & Milkie, 2007; Pearlin & Schooler, 1978). Given the importance of mastery for well-being at older ages, understanding its determinants is an important objective. Considerable prior empirical and theoretical work has focused on the role of socioeconomic status as a predictor of mastery (Gadalla, 2009; Mirowsky & Ross, 2003; Pearlin et al., 2007; Schieman & Turner, 1998). Socioeconomic status is theorized to contribute to mastery through a variety of pathways. First, higher levels of objective socioeconomic status increase individuals’ actual control over their lives, which frequently leads to a greater sense of control. For example, greater financial resources increase individuals’ abilities to effectively control many life circumstances, such as the kind of neighborhood they live in or whether they can pay for needed medical treatment. Higher occupational status is linked to greater control in workplaces (Marmot, 2004), and the cognitive skills conferred by higher levels of education are also thought to enable individuals to more successfully navigate and manage life circumstances (Mirowsky & Ross, 2003). Second, individuals’ perceptions of their objective socioeconomic status attainment confer mastery as individuals successfully achieve markers of social status, like higher education or economic stability. The personal achievement of desired and consequential markers of socioeconomic status imbues individuals with the sense that they are in control of their lives. Conversely, individuals’ perceptions that they have fallen short of desired social status may compromise mastery. Finally, socioeconomic status is associated with stress exposure (Baum, Garofalo, & Yali, 1999), which is also theorized to impact mastery. Stressors that are thought to be particularly consequential for mastery are those, like socioeconomic status, that are difficult to change and those associated with major domains of life (Pearlin et al., 2007). Stressors associated with socioeconomic status are linked to both objective levels of socioeconomic status, such as difficulty of making ends meet associated with absolute deprivation (i.e., “being poor”) and to perceptions of socioeconomic status, such as feeling inferior to others associated with relative deprivation (i.e., “feeling poor”). Relative deprivation theory (Stouffer, Suchman, DeVinney, Star, & Williams, 1949) posits that individuals use social comparisons to evaluate objective position markers like income, and that these perceptions of position relative to others have implications for individuals’ beliefs and attitudes over and above their own objective or absolute position. Beyond acknowledging the social psychological impact of individuals’ subjective perceptions of their position relative to others (and beliefs that they may have fallen short) outlined above, an important issue in relative deprivation theory with implications for the study of mastery is the problem of multiple reference groups—the possibility that multiple social comparisons can yield multiple social statuses depending on social context (Merton & Rossi, 1968). For instance, an individual may be of relatively low social status compared with Americans as a whole, but may be of relatively high standing in his local community. Though an individual has a nearly infinite number of possible reference groups, classic social comparison theory stipulates that individuals most often compare themselves with similar and familiar others (Festinger, 1954; Stouffer et al., 1949), such as friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. Comparisons to similar others may be particularly influential because individuals are more likely to have frequent contact with similar others and similar others may make for more salient comparisons (Merton & Rossi, 1968). For example, an individual may acknowledge that she is poor compared with an actress or professional athlete, but her low social status relative to these celebrities may be far less important to her than being worse off compared with a neighbor with whom she has much more in common and sees every day. In short, the potential implications of socioeconomic status for mastery come both from conditions tied to objective socioeconomic status as well as individuals’ perceptions of their socioeconomic status. Prior work, however, has generally focused only on objective measures of socioeconomic position rather than also on individuals’ perceptions of socioeconomic position. This is problematic because objective measures of socioeconomic status capture how socioeconomic status confers mastery via objective means (like greater financial resources linked to income), but objective measures do not capture how socioeconomic status impacts mastery via individuals’ perceptions of their socioeconomic position relative to others. Simply put, it is possible that an individual may objectively be poor (be experiencing absolute deprivation), but may not actually perceive themselves to be poor (be experiencing relative deprivation). Further, whether the relationship between perceptions of socioeconomic status and mastery varies by specific reference group has not been tested. Relative deprivation and social comparison theories suggest the particular importance of socially proximate reference groups like friends, neighbors, and coworkers, but empirical studies of perceptions of perceived socioeconomic status and other outcomes such as health have tended to find stronger relationships with more distal reference groups such as American families (Wolff, Subramanian, Acevedo-Garcia, Weber, & Kawachi, 2010). Increases in income inequality within the United States over the past few decades (Neckerman & Torche, 2007) makes the examination of psychosocial implications of perceived income inequality on a national level particularly important. Thus, the present study examines the relationship between mastery and perceived economic position relative to both peers and American families. The current study uses data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a nationally-representative sample of Americans aged 57 to 85, to examine the links between perceived economic position, objective economic status, and environmental mastery. I employ two measures of perceived economic position (PEP) that ask respondents to rate their household income relative to two different reference groups: people they know and American families more broadly. These PEP measures more closely measure perceptions of relative income deprivation than prior studies that have focused on objective income levels. Examining the relationship between perceived economic position, objective socioeconomic status, and environmental mastery among older Americans is important because of two facts. First, some research suggests that income inequality in the United States increases over the life course (Crystal & Waehrer, 1996). Second, at the same time, Social Security provides an income floor that protects many individuals from absolute deprivation. The diminishing role of absolute deprivation combined with greater relative inequality in the later life course may make the impact of perceptions of economic position particularly important for mastery among older Americans. The current study asks two questions. First, is perceived economic position associated with mastery after controlling for objective economic status? Second, does the relationship between perceived economic position and mastery vary by reference group (PEP relative to peers, PEP relative to American families)?