Socioeconomic inequalities in mortality and importance of perceived control: cohort study.

Perceived control has convincingly been suggested to be a key concept in explaining socioeconomic differences in health. Some empirical evidence exists of a higher prevalence of low control beliefs (such as powerlessness or fatalism) in lower socioeconomic groups and that this is relevant to socioeconomic inequalities in general health. However, a systematic examination of the extent to which perceived control contributes to socioeconomic inequalities in mortality is lacking. This is important, as attention has recently shifted towards psychological and psychosocial explanations of socioeconomic inequalities in health.