Dental health and social mobility

A recent study has found that people’s view of their dental health is linked to their position on the social ladder and their experiences of upwards or downwards social mobility.

What we asked you

As part of the Age 46 Survey, we asked you to rate your dental health on a scale from ‘excellent’ to ‘poor’.

A team of researchers from King’s College London conducted a study using your answers to this question along with information we’d collected about your working lives, and what your parents did for a living. Organising people into different groups – those who had moved up the social ladder compared to their parents, those who had moved down, and those who stayed on the same rung as their parents – they examined variations in people’s perceptions of their dental health.

What the research found

Among your generation, around a third of people had started life higher up the social ladder and remained there while another third had improved their social status compared to their parents. Just over a quarter of people had stayed on a lower rung of the social ladder, and just under one in ten had moved down.

The researchers found there was a strong connection between how people rated their dental health and their social status through life.

Those who had come from families with high social status and who had retained this position tended to report the best dental health of all. Compared to this group, those who had experienced lower social status through life, and those who had moved down the ladder compared to their parents, had more than twice the odds of reporting poor dental health. Those who had improved their social status were less likely to report poor dental health compared to those who had moved lower, or remained lower, down the ladder. But they were still more likely to rate their dental health as poor compared to those who had retained high social status through life.

In addition, women had a more positive perception of their dental health than men, and those living in rural areas tended to rate this aspect of their health more highly than their peers in urban areas.

Why this research matters

This new research shows that both early life experiences and how people then move up or down the social ladder are important factors for midlife dental health. It suggests that addressing social inequalities could help reduce differences in dental health.

Read the full research report

Trajectories of social class and adult self-perceived oral health by Reem Aljubair and Elsa Karina Delgado-Angulo published in Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology in August 2024.