Early-life impairments, chronic health conditions, and income mobility.

Individuals who have congenital conditions or become disabled early in life tend to have poorer educational and occupational outcomes than non-disabled individuals. Disability is known to be a complex entity with multiple causations, involving, inter alia, physiological, social, economic, and cultural factors. It is established that social factors can influence educational and occupational attainment for disabled people, and current disability policy in many countries, particularly in the Global North, stress the importance of equality of opportunity. However, there is a scarcity of research that explores the specific degrees to which advanced welfare states contribute to the equalization of life chances for individuals with early-life impairments and chronic health conditions. In this study, we use a Norwegian sample of high-quality register data on individuals with vision loss, hearing loss, physical impairment, type 1 diabetes, asthma, and Down syndrome diagnosed early in life and compare their intergenerational income mobility trajectories with a random sample drawn from the country's entire population. We find that individuals' early-life diagnoses are linked to significantly worse income outcomes in adulthood than what is observed among the general population. We conclude that even in one of the most advanced egalitarian welfare states, such as Norway, much remains to be done to equalize life chances for individuals with early-life impairments and chronic health conditions.

No evidence that social-democratic welfare states equalize valued outcomes for individuals with disabilities.

It is acknowledged that generous welfare states can provide better outcomes to their populations in terms of objective and subjective indicators of well-being, yet there is little comparative evidence of the role that the welfare state regime plays in lessening disability-based inequalities. Using a large comparative data set of most European societies, Tukey's honestly significant difference and generalized Hausman tests for six welfare state regimes, we examine the assumption that social-democratic countries perform better in mitigating disability-based inequalities than conservative, liberal, Southern, Eastern European, and the former Soviet Union welfare state regimes. We compare the valued outcomes for individuals with and without disabilities regarding their education, labour market participation, material well-being, and life satisfaction. The main finding of this study is that the most generous welfare states in Europe do not perform better, and in some cases, perform worse, than other less comprehensive welfare state regimes in closing the gap in valued outcomes between individuals with disabilities and the rest of the population. We discuss potential explanations of these inequalities such as the nature of expectations and changing characteristics of welfare state regimes, and difficulties related to measuring disabilities across European societies.

ILLNESS IS WORK: Revisiting the concept of illness careers and recognizing the identity work of patients with ME/CFS.

The concept of careers has an extensive history in the sociology of health and illness. Among other things, the notion of a career has been used to describe the changing identities of patients diagnosed with mental illness, to identify distinct stages in the progression of various illnesses, and to recognize the cooperative efforts of hospitalized patients. However, the career concept may be reanalyzed as part of an analytical metaphor that makes salient both the agency of people with illnesses and the social structures in which they are enmeshed. This metaphor, ILLNESS IS WORK, can valorize and aid understanding of the identity work and actions of patients with chronic illnesses, particularly illnesses with a low degree of social recognition and medical prestige such as myalgic encephalopathy and chronic fatigue syndrome.