
Jenny TorssanderStockholm University | SU · Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI)
Jenny Torssander
PhD
About
22
Publications
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Introduction
Research interests: Social stratification, mortality, families and households, intergenerational transmission of resources.
My current research focuses on how adult children’s socioeconomic resources and other structural conditions influence their ageing parents’ life chances.
Publications
Publications (22)
In addition to own education and other socioeconomic resources, the education of one's children may be important for individual health and longevity. Mothers and fathers born between 1932 and 1941 were analyzed by linking them to their children in the Swedish Multi-generation Register, which covers the total population. Controlling for parents' edu...
Circumstances in the family of origin have short- and long-term consequences for people's health. Family background also influences educational achievements – achievements that are clearly linked to various health outcomes. Utilizing population register data, we compared Swedish siblings with different levels of education (1,732,119 individuals wit...
Background:
Parents have lower mortality than childless individuals, and one possible explanation is support provided by adult children. Since stroke often results in functional limitations, support from children may be of particular importance. Here, we examine whether the presence of children matters for survival after stroke among older Swedish...
Intelligence has repeatedly been linked to a range of different outcomes, including education, labour market success and health. Lower intelligence is consistently associated with worse outcomes. In this study, we analyzed the associations between intelligence measured in childhood, and the risk of experiencing a range of different configurations o...
Introduction
Elderly parents have lower mortality than childless individuals. Suggested explanations for this finding include selection into parenthood, influence on health behaviors, and social support from adult children to their ageing parents. Previous studies have mostly focused on the association between number of children and mortality rates...
Because people tend to marry social equals – and possibly also because partners affect each other's health – the social position of one partner is associated with the other partner's health and mortality. Although this link is fairly well established, the underlying mechanisms are not fully identified. Analyzing disease incidence and survival separ...
Background:
Education is believed to have positive spillover effects across network connections. Partner's education may be an important resource preventing the incidence of disease and helping patients cope with illness. We examined how partner's education predicted myocardial infarction (MI) incidence and survival net of own education and other...
Background
It is known that parents have lower mortality than childless individuals. Support from adult children to ageing parents may be of importance for parental health and longevity. The aim of this study was to estimate the association between having a child and the risk of death, and to examine whether the association increased at older ages...
This study explores how life expectancy at age 35 has evolved across the income distribution in Sweden over time. We examine individual income for men 1970–2007 and family income for both men and women 1980–2007. During this period, income inequality increased in most western countries, but especially so in Sweden. Drawing on a large sample of the...
To experience difficulties such as poverty, joblessness, or mental disease, may not only impair one’s current life situation but could also involve increased later-life mortality risks. Although various types of disadvantage often are interrelated, little attention has been paid to the multifaceted interplay between disadvantages and subsequent mor...
Background:
The inverse association between education and mortality has grown stronger the last decades in many countries. During the same period, gains in life expectancy have been concentrated to older ages; still, old-age mortality is seldom the focus of attention when analyzing trends in the education-mortality gradient. It is further unknown...
Recent research has shown that the parents of well-educated children live longer than do other parents and that this association is only partly confounded by the parent's own socioeconomic position. However, the relationships between other aspects of children's socioeconomic position (e.g., occupational class and economic resources) and parental mo...
Socioeconomic positions of individuals are clearly associated with the chances of living a healthy long life. In four empirical studies based on Swedish population registers, two topics are examined in this thesis: The relationships between different indicators of social position and mortality, and the importance of family members’ socioeconomic re...
In 1949-1962, Sweden implemented a 1-y increase in compulsory schooling as a quasi-experiment. Each year, children in a number of municipalities were exposed to the reform and others were kept as controls, allowing us to test the hypothesis that education is causally related to mortality. We studied all children born between 1943 and 1955, in 900 S...
In many analyses of social inequality in health, different dimensions of social stratification have been used more or less
interchangeably as measures of the individual's general social standing. This procedure, however, has been questioned in previous
studies, most of them comparing education, class, and/or income. In this article, the importance...
Dimensions of the individual socioeconomic position-education, social class, social status and income-are associated with mortality. Inequalities in death also related to the social position of the household. It is, however, less clear how the socioeconomic position of one marital/cohabiting partner influences the mortality of the other partner. We...
Mortality is strongly associated with education. We present relative death risks of men and women in 12 educational/ occupational groups in Sweden today, with a focus on individuals with higher education.
Results from Cox regressions are reported for 12 educational groups with special emphasis on those with professional education, e.g. clerics, phy...
Previous studies have shown that causes of death differ in their relationship to social class, but we lack a more comprehensive description of this variation. The present study provides a detailed and extensive list of social class differences for a large number of specific causes of death.
All deaths between 1991 and 2003 in Sweden were linked wit...