Abstract
There are plenty of the studies concerning the relationship between social status and health, but recently the trajectory of worsening health has attracted attention. Therefore, I examined the relationship among the process of worsening health and retirement and social status among elderly Japanese people using latent growth curve models. This study employed a National Survey of the Japanese Elderly, from wave I to wave III, which was conducted by Michigan University and Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology. I used the first three waves data which is published from ICPSR. The latent growth curve model is an analytic method that applies a confirmatory factor analysis to treat a panel data set. The results of this study showed that 1) though social stratification doesn't affect the process of worsening health, women tend to deteriorate in health faster and 2) a good health status at the starting point has an influence on length of time in the workforce, but the reverse is not true. These facts revealed a part of the relationship between processes of health and processes of labor in their later life.
