Old-age mortality and social class in northern Norway in the first half of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT

The number of studies on social inequality in mortality in Norway before 1960 is limited and they often focus on early life outcomes. Little is known about socioeconomic differences in old-age mortality before the emergence of the welfare state. Linked census and church records from the Historical Population Register of Norway were used to study a sample of 10,457 men and women born 1841–1870 who lived in Troms, a province in northern Norway, in the early twentieth century. We analysed the association between social class, measured in adulthood, and mortality at age 60 and older using Cox proportional hazards models. The results do not indicate a clear social gradient in mortality. Differences between social classes varied in the magnitude and direction of effects, depending on gender and place of residence. For women, the association between social class and mortality was weaker overall. Only farming was significantly associated with decreased mortality risk compared to the group of lower-skilled and unskilled workers. Differences were more pronounced among men, with higher mortality for non-manual classes in towns, and lower mortality for skilled workers and farmers in rural areas. The advantage for farmers was amplified in combination with manual or non-manual work.

KEYWORDS:

• Social class
• twentieth century
• mortality
• old age
• northern Norway

JEL CODES:

• N33
• N34
• I14

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the ‘High North Population Studies’ project at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The 1910 census is the baseline source for almost three quarters of the individuals in the final study sample, which is why it is taken as the reference point for discussion of linking rates and representativeness. Comparing the linked sample to the total population in 1900 indicated the same selection effects (not shown).

2 HISCLASS and SOCPO classifications based on HISCO-codes were extracted from a dataset for the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) (Mandemakers et al., 2020) and manually amended for this study, where needed.