Testing of a Dual Process Model to Resolve the Socioeconomic Health Disparities: A Tale of Two Asian Countries

A wealth of past studies documented that individuals of lower socioeconomic status (SES) are more susceptible to both acute and chronic life stress than those of higher SES, but some recent evidence documents that not all individuals from the lower SES group experience immense stress. The present study was grounded in theories of coping and psychological adjustment, and a dual process model was formulated to address some resolved issues regarding socioeconomic disparities in health. For a robust test of the proposed dual process model, data were collected from two Asian countries-Hong Kong and Indonesia-with different socioeconomic heritage and conditions. Consistent with the predictions of our model, the present findings revealed that coping flexibility was a psychological mechanism underlying the positive association between social capital and health for the lower SES group, whereas active coping was a psychological mechanism underlying this positive association for the higher SES group. These patterns of results were largely replicable in both Asian samples, providing robust empirical support for the proposed dual process model.

Automated summary

Research has shown that individuals of lower socioeconomic status are more susceptible to life stress, but not all of them experience immense stress. Coping flexibility was found to be a psychological mechanism underlying the positive association between social capital and health for lower SES individuals, while active coping was identified as the mechanism for higher SES individuals. The dual process model proposed in the study received robust empirical support in samples from Hong Kong and Indonesia.