Socioeconomic-status (SES) is one of the strongest correlates of health outcomes. Individuals with higher level of education and income, or who have more prestigious jobs usually have better health and longer lives (see among others Luy et al. 2015). The effect of SES on different general health measures is relatively consistent and the result usually does not depend on the measure of SES used.

What happens instead in a population where the SES of an individual has hardly any meaning? Is there a way to include a specific measure of the effect of characteristics similar to SES on health outcomes?

In this submission we present the first results of the analysis of the effect of education and SES-proxy measures on health and well-being outcomes in two different populations. We compare the data about the general German and Austrian population with data stemming from the ASCOM survey (Wiedemann et al. 2014) on health aspects of the German and Austrian monastic population. The interest of this comparison rely on the fact that in monastic populations the SES of individuals – provided it can be measured at all  - cannot have the same meaning as in the general population.