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Meharry Medical College Journal o Health Care or the Poor and Underserved 27 (2016): 869890.

Te Intergenerational ransfer of EducationCredentials and Health: Evidence from the 2008

General Social Survey-National Death Index

Esther M. Friedman, PhD

Peter Muennig, MD, MPH

Abstract:Background. Te educational attainment o a parent is a powerul predictor ochildrens wellbeing, but little is known about why this is the case. Methods. We used the2008 General Social Survey to explore actors that may explain the relationship between ones

athers education and ones own mortality. Tese include (1) intellectual traits, (2) materialwellbeing, (3) psychological characteristics, (4) personality characteristics, and (5) socialcapital. Results. Te education credentials o ones ather are signicantly associated withones risk o death. Te strongest mediators are own educational attainment, amily income,home ownership, and subjective socioeconomic status. o a lesser extent, respondentshappiness with riends and work and social bonding were also pathways. Conclusions.A athers educational attainment appears to inuence his childrens health, and may doso not only by improving the childs material circumstances but also through his or hereducational attainment and other psychological and social characteristics.

Key words:Intergenerational; socioeconomic status; survival analysis; General Social Survey;National Death Index.

he Servicemens Readjustment Act o 1944 ollowing World War II greatly increasedthe number o Americans with higher education.1Such improvements in educa-tional attainment are strongly linked to a variety o positive lie outcomes, including

a longer, healthier lie,26 greater job satisaction, and better work conditions.7Tere

is also a direct effect o education on cognitive traits and non-cognitive traits (e.g.,

learning to navigate social relationships with peers).8

Te benets o schooling are not only related to the wellbeing o individuals but also

have implications across generations. Tese benetsthe material as well as the cogni-

tive and socialmay all be transerred to children. It is well established, or instance,

that more educated parents have more educated children.9 In addition, children o

parents with high educational attainment tend to be exposed to more vocabulary, more

ORIGINAL PAPER

ESTHER M. FRIEDMANis a Behavioral and Social Scientist at RAND and Professor at the PardeeRAND Graduate School. PETER MUENNIGis with the Mailman School of Public Health at ColumbiaUniversity, New York. Authors listed in alphabetical order, but contributed equally to the paper. Teauthors would like to acknowledge Jaeseung Kim for invaluable help with variable construction andmodel development in the early stages of this papers development. Please address correspondence to:Esther M. Friedman, RAND, 1776 Main St, Santa Monica, CA 90401 or email: friedman@rand .org.

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870 Intergenerational education and mortality

advanced math skills, and receive greater positive affi rmation than children o parents

with less educational attainment.10,11 Tis may explain why the inormation, values,

ideas, and belies that students acquire while in school produce intergenerational health

benets.1216

Tat children acquire a variety o cognitive and non-cognitive traits romwell-schooled parents raises the intriguing idea that a short-term social policy such the

Servicemens Readjustment Act might permanently and undamentally alter the collec-

tive ideas, belies, values, and cognitive traits o society as a whole or generations. Tis

most clearly occurs by educating less advantaged people who would otherwise have

not had the opportunity to achieve these levels o schooling and who transmit these

changes to the next generation in their amilies. Such a policy could have signicant

implications or the health o at least two generations. It is also plausible that such a

policy could weave knowledge and norms into the collective social abric or even

more generations to come.

In this paper, we use a unique dataset rst to establish that the health benets o

higher educational attainment are passed on to children, and second to examine how

this might occur. With respect to the ormer question, there is already a body o worksuggesting that parental education is related to offsprings health and mortality.46Much

less is known about the latter question, however. Possibly, parents who attended college

have acquired traits that later inuenced their childrens own educational attainment,

income, home ownership, subjective perceptions, and social capitaltraits that have all

been linked to health and longevity.1720Such traits might include knowledge, personality

characteristics, IQ, or even social/environmental characteristics such as perceived trust

in others (which is one oundation upon which social capital is built).21,22We explore

the intergenerational transer o a number o characteristics and resources, including:

(a) intellectual traits (i.e., verbal IQ), (b) material wellbeing (represented here by home

ownership), (c) psychological characteristics (e.g., happiness), (d) personality charac-

teristics (e.g., optimism), and (e) social capital (e.g., ties with amily and riends). We

also consider the mediating role o the respondents own education and income and

sel-rated health.

Methods

Data. Our analysis was perormed using the 2008 General Social Survey-National

Death Index (2008 GSS-NDI) dataset, which links the 19782002 waves o the GSS to

NDI data through 2008.23Te 2008 GSS-NDI provides three decades o data that can

be weighted to be representative o the U.S. non-institutionalized civilian population.

It includes a total o 32,830 people, o whom 9,271 were deceased as o 2008. Te

mortality linkage has been extensively tested and validated.23,24

For this analysis, we excluded the Black and Hispanic oversamples in the 1982 and1987 waves (or a total n=32,173); removed subjects missing data on education, age,

gender, race, and survey year (n=120); removed subjects with missing inormation on

income (n=3,144). We also excluded subjects who do not report inormation on their

athers educational attainments. Tis includes subjects who report that this is not ap-

plicable (n=4,423), those who report that they do not know their athers educational

attainment (n=1,674), and those with no response (n=173). Tis lef us with 22,759



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871Friedman and Muennig

individuals ollowed over 361,807 person-years, and capturing 5,990 deaths over

this time period. Te sample sizes change a good deal in each analysis because some

explanatory variables were not obtained in particular waves o the GSS. However these

omissions were systematic and should not affect the representativeness o our sample.All analyses are weighted using the GSS-provided sampling weights.

Measures. Our principal outcome o interest was mortality hazards. Our primary

independent variable is the athers highest degree. Tis variable is grouped into ve

categories, less than high school, high school diploma, junior college degree, bachelors

degree, graduate degree, respectively. Because the number o observations or the junior

college group is extremely small, we combined junior college and high school into one

single group or the analyses.

Te decade o interview included two categories: whether individuals were surveyed

in 19801990 or in 19902008. We also broke down the second group urther, but

results did not differ or the two recent decades. We controlled or age, race, and gender

to capture xed socio-demographic characteristics (as conounders). We chose not to

control or actors that plausibly link the mechanism o interest, such as smoking ordrinking, in the happiness-mortality hazards pathway.

We dened non-xed characteristics as potential explanatory variables. Specically,

we explored ve domains o items captured in the GSS:

(1) Verbal IQ. IQ was measured in the GSS through a 10-item vocabulary test based

on the Gallup-Torndike verbal intelligence test, with a total score ranging rom 010

words correct. Larger numbers indicate more words were correct.

(2) Socioeconomic Status(SES). We included a number o measures o SES: whether

respondent owned his or her house or rented it; income in quintiles; and respondents

own educational attainments (based on degree attainment inormation in the GSS).

(3) Relative SES.Respondents relative SES was calculated in terms o responses to

three items rom the GSS: relative income, measured in response to a question com-

pared with American amilies in general, would you say your amily income is ar below

average, below average, average, above average, or ar above average? (with response

categories ranging rom ar above to ar below average); respondents satisaction with

his/her nancial situation based on a response to We are interested in how people are

getting along nancially these days. So ar as you and your amily are concerned, would

you say that you are pretty well satised with your present nancial situation, more or

less satised, or not satised at all? with response categories o pretty well satised,

more or less satised, not at all satised ; and subjective class identication identied

in response to a question asking about I you were asked to use one o our names

or your social class, which would you say you belong in: the lower class, the working

class, the middle class, or the upper class? with response categories ranging rom lower

to upper class. Items were averaged together and the overall index ranged rom 1 to 4.(4) Psychological wellbeing.Psychological wellbeing included measures o sel-reported

overall happiness (I you were to consider your lie in general, how happy or unhappy

would you say you are, on the whole?); reported marital happiness (aking things

all together, how would you describe your marriage? Would you say that your mar-

riage is very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?; and satisaction with ones job

(On the whole, how satised are you with the work you dowould you say you are



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872 Intergenerational education and mortality

very satised, moderately satised, a little dissatised, or very dissatised?), and with

riends and non-work hobbies.

(5) Social characteristics.Social characteristics included responses to the ollowing

measures o social capital: Would you say that most o the time people try to be helpul,or that they are mostly just looking out or themselves? ; Generally speaking, would

you say that most people can be trusted or that you cant be too careul in dealing with

people?; and social support, which included responses to how ofen the respondent

spends time with riends, relatives, and amily or go to bars/taverns, as well as religious

activity, which may capture another side o social capital/connectedness.

(6) Optimism. Optimism was measured in the GSS through a question asking:

Te way things are in America, people like me and my amily have a good chance o

improving our standard o livingdo you agree or disagree?.

Parental education. Parental education could have been coded in a variety o different

ways: athers education, mothers education, maximum education, or some average.

We chose to ocus primarily on athers education because or older cohorts within

developed nations, the athers highest degree may be a better predictor o amilialsocioeconomic status than the mothers highest degree.25In the U.S., or instance, in the

1940s through the late 1960s ew women obtained college or university degrees.25As a

sensitivity analysis, we also replicated all analyses using mothers education instead o

athers education and provide these results in the Appendix tables (ables A-2 to A-5).

As described above, the GSS includes a variety o scales measuring different social

and psychological domains. We took the items rom the GSS and perormed explana-

tory actor analyses to reduce the dimensionality o domains 3, 4, and 5 enumerated

above, which contained multiple survey items. Te analysis identied housing tenure

and subjective perception o socioeconomic status as distinct domains (satisaction

with nancial situation and subjective assessment o nancial situation relative to

average, actor loadings ranging rom 0.53 to 0.61). Within the psychological domains,

two actors were identied: existential satisaction (overall happiness, happiness with

marriage, and satisaction with job, actor loading ranging rom 0.33 to 0.59) and sat-

isaction with leisure time (riends and hobbies, actor loadings ranging rom 0.41 to

0.42). Within the social capital domain, we have our distinct actors, bridging social

capital (trust in others, eeling that people look out or themselves, actor loadings

ranging rom 0.48 to 0.49) requency o contact with riends (actor loadings ranging

rom 0.41to 0.43); requency o contract with amily (actor loadings ranging rom 0.63

to 0.67); and requency o involvement in religious activities (actor loadings ranging

rom 0.61 to 0.72). Within each domain, items were averaged together or one score.

Specic items in each scale are described in more detail in Appendix able A-1 along

with descriptive statistics.

Finally, we also explored whether sel-rated health played a meditational role, sincehaving athers with higher education degrees might improve respondents health.

Similarly, we also included amily income and respondents education to see their

meditational effects.

Statistical analyses. We use discrete time hazard models to calculate the hazard

ratios (HR) or those parents with the highest degree levels relative to those with less

than a high school diploma. Tese models estimate the proportion o the sample that



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873Friedman and Muennig

experiences the event (in this case, death) during a specic time period (beginning in

1978, with sampling conducted through 2002 and mortality ollow-up through 2008).26

Our dependent variable is the vital status o the individual within a given year, which

is dichotomous in nature (alive/dead). We chose the most parsimonious unctionalorm or our models, and the quadratic orm provided the best model t. We calculate

hazard rates using the complementary log-log link.27

o test the proportional hazard assumption, we rst examined the interaction o

duration o survival and the athers highest degree, which was not signicant. Ten,

we plotted the log-log survival curves or each group o the athers highest degree,

and these were proportional. Tis suggests that we employed the appropriate survival

analysis, the cloglog, which yields a HR.

o test the inuence o our constructed domains on the parental education-mortality

hazards relationship, we employed a traditional mediation approach that combined item

responses as a continuous variable.28,29First, we checked the relationship between the

athers highest degree and the explanatory variables under study. I this relationship is

signicant, we next examined whether adding explanatory variables reduced the totaleffect o the athers education on mortality by measuring changes in the hazard ratio

(HR). Potential psychosocial and material explanatory variables were added one at a

time to the baseline regression, and were tested in separate models. Te GSS-NDI was

approved by the Columbia University Institutional Review Board.

Results

able 1 shows the descriptive characteristics o the sample by the athers educational

attainment. Respondents with less-educated athers tend to be older, non-White, less

well off, and with less educational attainment. College graduation rates were 13% or

individuals whose athers had less than a high school education, 26% o respondents

whose ather completed high school, 54% o respondents whose athers have a bachelors

degree, and 61% o respondents whose athers obtained graduate degrees themselves.

Similarly, subjective SES (opinion o amily income, satisaction with nancial situation,

and social class) differed by the respondents athers education. Respondents with the

least-educated athers, or example, have an average subjective SES score o 2.43 (out

o 4) compared with 2.75 or those respondents whose ather completed a graduate

degree. wenty-eight percent o individuals whose athers do not complete high school

are in air or poor health compared to 14% o those whose athers completed high

school, and 10% o those whose athers completed college or have a graduate degree.

Individuals with less-educated athers are also less likely to be homeowners and are

less satised with their marriages, amilies, and jobs. Tey also have less social capital

measured as requency o contact with amily and riends or measured as social bond-ing or trust. Te means and standard deviations or the individual items that constitute

the constructed scales we use are provided in Appendix able A-1.

able 2 depicts the adjusted HRs associated with each additional degree garnered

by the respondents ather. We present ve models. Te rst model depicts the HR or

each level o parental education or the total sample with controls or the respondents

age, gender, race, and survey decade. Te second model is similar to Model 1 only



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Table1.

DESCRIPTIVE

CHARACTERISTICSOFTH

ESAMPLEBYFATHERSED

UCATION.2008GENERALS

OCIAL

SURVEYNAT

IONALDEATHINDEXa

FathersEducation

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