Role of Personal Psychological Resources in Explaining Age-Related Health Inequalities in European Countries

Abstract

The article discusses the deterioration of health with age and the possibility of explaining it, in addition to the natural processes of physical aging, by the growing deficit of individual psychological resources necessary to overcome life's hardships and the following stress. The authors examine data of the European Social Survey (ESS Round 6) for 27 countries divided by two groups, namely, weak and strong welfare states. Two-level regression modelling allows revealing the dependence of indirect effects on the contextual moderator — government expenditure on health.

The results of the study show that in all countries, psychological resources are an important factor in maintaining health. They help to partly explain age-related differences in well-being, playing the role of a mediator between the age structure and related health inequalities. With age, people lose the psychological qualities necessary to overcome life's difficulties, and this exacerbates health problems in older people. Such mediation effects are especially noticeable in countries with a weak social state, under the Eastern European regime of providing social guarantees or low government spending on health care. In these countries, it is more difficult for representatives of vulnerable groups, including people in older ages, to maintain psychological confidence in their own abilities and preserve the possibility to change their lives for the better, since they largely have to rely only on themselves. The social-democratic regime, providing universal social guarantees and equal access to high-quality medical services, creates favorable conditions for the preservation of psychological resources by the elderly, which create additional barriers to physiological aging and loss of health. The article discusses mediation associated with such qualities as autonomy and control, optimism, self-esteem, resilience, and competence.