Health Lifestyles in Italy: A Tale of Social Inequality

Epidemiological research has shown that there exists a significant association between individuals’ socioeconomic position and their health status. Setting aside the role played by genetic factors, the “causal chain” that relates these two variables is usually summarized as follows: the resources individuals derive from their socioeconomic position affect their lifestyle; in turn, individuals’ lifestyle influences their health status, by exposing them to harmful agents and/or preventing them from adopting healthy practices. Therefore, an accurate knowledge of the way socioeconomic position relates to lifestyle might be crucial for promoting people’s health and reducing social inequalities in health chances. The purpose of this work is twofold. First, using an unsupervised neural network classifier (self-organizing map), we identify a meaningful space of health-related practices, from which we derive – using cluster analysis – a relatively fine-grained typology of health lifestyles in contemporary Italy; to this aim, we consider not only the indicators most commonly used in health lifestyle studies (i.e., smoking habits, diet, physical exercise), but also some under-analyzed practices such as medical checkups and non-conventional therapies. Second, using regression analysis, we estimate the association between individuals’ socioeconomic position – measured in terms of educational level and occupational class – and their health lifestyle. To tackle our research objectives, we use data drawn from the 2004/05 edition of the Health Conditions and Access to Health Services Survey, carried out by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a large probability sample of the Italian population (n = 128,040). Our analyses show that the Italian space of health lifestyles is composed of well-defined constellations of health-related practices. Moreover, the analyses corroborate the hypothesis of a significant association between individuals’ socioeconomic position and their health lifestyle. We conclude that the analysis of the relationship between socioeconomic position and health lifestyle can shed light on health inequalities in contemporary Italy.