The effect of occupational status on health: Putting the social in socioeconomic status.

High status occupations support positive health outcomes through providing access to both material and psychosocial resources. However, common measures of occupational status such as occupational prestige scores fail to capture cultural esteem that certain occupations can provide because they are primarily associated with the material dimensions of status, like income. Drawing on Weberian conceptions of status and a body of social psychological research on the measurement of cultural meaning, we argue that measuring people's ratings of their occupations on three dimensions-evaluation (good/bad), potency (powerful/weak), and activity (active/inactive)-provides an occupational status indicator that more fully captures psychosocial resources like esteem that are associated with health than more commonly used occupational prestige scores.

How Cultural Meanings of Occupations in the U.S. Changed During the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Social research highlights the stability of cultural beliefs, broadly arguing that population-level changes are uncommon and mostly explained by cohort replacement rather than individual-level change. We find evidence suggesting that cultural change may also occur rapidly in response to an economically and socially transformative period. Using data collected just before and after the outbreak of Covid-19 in the U.