text that promotes values of egalitarianism may in turn promote feelings of relative deprivation, as it encourages people to make comparisons with affluent others . It could also be argued that psychosocial mechanisms may be more important in a setting where material deprivation, in an absolute sense, is not as common. However, even though these explanations seem important, this would not be as central for generating relative deprivation as large income disparities in a society.
In sum, our study suggests that relative deprivation, based on social comparisons of income, is significantly associated with premature mortality in Sweden, over and above the effect of absolute income. Relative deprivation was found to be most important among men, although weak among the poorest individuals.
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
MÅY, NK, SH, IK all made substantial contributions to the manuscript. MÅY had the main responsibility for drafting the manuscript. NK and IK contributed substantially to the design of the study, revising the manuscript and interpretation of the results. SH performed the statistical analyses and contributed to the draft regarding methods and analyses. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.
The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here:
Flow diagram over sample size.
We are grateful to Anthony Garcy and Susanna Toivanen for their input and suggestions regarding the data.
Funding: This work was supported by Stiftelsen Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Sweden (to MÅY and SH) and (to NK) by the Health Labour Sciences Research Grant (Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare, Japan) and a Grant-in Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas (No.22119504) (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Japan).