Gradient of Disability across the Socioeconomic Spectrum in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Although the relationship between extreme poverty and poor health among older adults has long been recognized, less attention has been devoted to investigating whether a gradient in disability exists in the United States among persons with middle-class and upper-class incomes. We attempted to determine whether a gradient in functional limitation exists across the full spectrum of income among persons 55 years of age or older. METHODS: We obtained data from the Census 2000 Supplementary Survey, which used the methods and questionnaire of the American Community Survey, a nationally representative survey of 890,698 households with a response rate of 95 percent. Our sample included 149,000 men and 186,675 women who were at least 55 years of age, of whom 32,680 men and 48,111 women reported having a functional limitation (a long-lasting condition that substantially limited one or more basic physical activities, such as climbing stairs or lifting). RESULTS: A social-class gradient was observed for both men and women between the ages of 55 and 84, a gradient that held true even at the upper rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. For example, in comparison to persons between the ages of 55 and 64 who lived at 700 percent of the poverty line or above, persons of the same age but below the poverty line had six times the odds of reporting a functional limitation. With increasing income, the odds ratio declined. A significant gradient was present up to, but not beyond, the age of 85 years. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that functional limitation in Americans between the ages of 55 and 84 years is inversely related to social class across the full spectrum of the socioeconomic gradient.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".