Subjective Social Status, Life Course SES, and BMI in Young Adulthood Matt Bradshaw, Blake Victor Kent, W. Matthew Henderson, and Anna Catherine Setar Baylor University Objective: Socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with many aspects of health and well-being, including body mass index (BMI). Most research in this area has focused on objective indicators of SES such as education and income, but recent work suggests that subjective social status (SSS) is also important. This study contributes to a growing body of research on SSS and BMI. Method: Data from Waves I and IV the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a study of 14,780 individuals followed from adolescence to young adulthood, were analyzed. Results: Analyses showed that (a) SSS was inversely associated with BMI among young adults, (b) objective SES in both adulthood and early life explained about half of this relationship, (c) SSS appeared to offer a partial explanation for the association between SES (in both adulthood and early life) and BMI, (d) health behaviors, psychological characteristics, self-rated health, and perceived stress explained part of the relationship between SSS and BMI after controlling for SES and other covariates, and (e) SSS had a residual association with BMI that was not accounted for by any of the variables in the full model. Conclusions: This work shows that SSS is important because it (a) has an independent association with BMI net of SES, which suggests that it captures unique aspects of social and economic conditions missed by objective indicators of SES and (b) may help link SES with BMI through perceptions of one’s place in the status hierarchy of society. Keywords: early life, life course, obesity, SES, social class Obesity rates have risen over the last several decades (Flegal, Kruszon-Moran, Carroll, Fryar, & Ogden, 2016), and body mass index (BMI) appears to increase during the transition from ado- lescence to adulthood (Gordon-Larsen, The, & Adair, 2010). These trends are weaker among certain segments of the population, however, and research suggests that individuals with high socio- economic status (SES) are less likely to be obese compared with their lower status counterparts (Parsons, Power, Logan, & Sum- merbelt, 1999; Sarlio-Lahteenkorva, 2007). Most of this research has focused on objective indicators of SES such as education and income, but recent work suggests that subjective social status (SSS)—that is, the perception of one’s location in the status hierarchy of society—is important as well (Adler, Epel, Castel- lazzo, & Ickovics, 2000; Goodman et al., 2001, 2003; Manuck, Phillips, Gianaros, Flory, & Muldoon, 2010). The current study builds on this work by analyzing data from the National Longitu- dinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to exam- ine (a) the relationship between SSS and BMI in young adulthood, (b) the role of SES in both adulthood and early life in shaping SSS and its association with BMI, and (c) additional mechanisms that may link SSS to BMI. Only a few studies to date have examined the relationship between SSS and BMI-related outcomes; several found an asso- ciation (Adler et al., 2000; Goodman et al., 2001, 2003; Manuck et al., 2010), whereas others reported null findings (Chen & Paterson, 2006; Ghaed & Gallo, 2007; Subramanyam et al., 2012). These discrepancies may be attributable, in part, to differences in sample characteristics. Several of these studies relied on small, conve- nience samples (Adler et al., 2000; Chen & Paterson, 2006; Ghaed & Gallo, 2007; Goodman et al., 2003), others only examined adolescents (Chen & Paterson, 2006; Goodman et al., 2003), one was based on Pennsylvania residents (Manuck et al., 2010), an- other analyzed data from England (Demakakos, Nazroo, Breeze, & Marmot, 2008), two focused exclusively on women (Adler et al., 2000; Ghaed & Gallo, 2007), and one was based solely on African Americans (Subramanyam et al., 2012). Drawing conclusions about the association between SSS and BMI from this variegated research is challenging. The current study seeks to move this literature forward by analyzing data from a large, national sample of young adults in the United States. The first goal is to address a simple question: Is SSS associated with BMI (see Pathway A in Figure 1)? Assuming that a relationship exists, the next goal of this work is to begin explaining it by addressing the following question: What role does SES (e.g., education, income, neighborhood conditions) play in shaping SSS and its association with BMI (Pathways B and This article was published Online First May 22, 2017. Matt Bradshaw, Blake Victor Kent, W. Matthew Henderson, and Anna Catherine Setar, Department of Sociology, Baylor University. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by Grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Na- tional Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledg- ment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from Grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Matt Bradshaw, Department of Sociology, Baylor University, 346.08 Draper Academic Building, One Bear Place #97326, Waco, TX 76798-7326. E-mail: drmattbradshaw@gmail.com This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Health Psychology © 2017 American Psychological Association 2017, Vol. 36, No. 7, 682– 694 0278-6133/17/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hea0000487 682