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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1464187
This article is part of the Research Topic Exploring Mental Health in Vulnerable Populations in Developing Countries View all 29 articles

Socioeconomic Inequalities in Depression and the Role of Job Conditions in China

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 Shanghai University, Shanghai, China
  • 2 International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The rising prevalence of depression in China, coupled with a tightening job market, highlights concern for the workforce's mental health. Although socioeconomic inequalities in depression have been well documented in high-income countries, the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and depression, along with its work-related mediators, has not been sufficiently studied in China. The study participants are 6536 non-agriculturally employed working adults from the 2020 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). We build linear regression models to examine the relationship between SES and depression, using education and income as indicators of SES. We also apply a framework based on seemingly unrelated estimation (SUEST) to assess how job conditions, which include job demands and job resources, mediate this relationship.Both education and income are negatively associated with depression, with education's association with depression remaining net of income. Mediation analysis reveals that the well-educated tend to occupy less demanding work with shorter working hours and lower probability of on-call duty, which partially helps explain the education-based depression gap. Higher earners experience more demanding work with longer working hours and higher probability of on-call duty, which potentially masks the income-based depression gap. Greater job resources including moderate schedule flexibility and better job security, appear to contribute to explaining the depression gap across SES. The cross-sectional design of this study precludes causal inferences. Not all typical job demands and resources could be included due to data limitations.Our study provides insights into socioeconomic inequalities in mental health in the Chinese working population, with implications for policies aimed at preventing depression and improving mental health equity.

    Keywords: Depression, socioeconomic status (SES), Job conditions, working hours, stress of higher status

    Received: 13 Jul 2024; Accepted: 07 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Ma, Wu and Marois. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jie Ma, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.