ABSTRACT
This chapter integrates and summarizes a line of research developed in somewhat more detail in several other papers (House et al., 1990a, 1990b, 1991). The research derives from an ongoing program project funded by the National Institute on Aging, entitled “Stress, Health and Productive Activity in Middle and Later Life,” which seeks to identify psychosocial factors that maintain and enhance health and effective functioning in middle and later life. The work presented here suggests that such psychosocial factors are both macrosocial and microsocial in nature. At the macrosocial level we focus on the system of social stratification in our society. We then try to show how position in the stratification system shapes exposure to microsocial risk factors that are the more proximate determinants of health over the life course.
