They wanted to find out if men, before they had been admitted to a mental hospital, drifted down the occupational scale to unskilled jobs because of their developing illness, or if it was because they were born into families with a lower social class attainment, that they developed their mental illness.
They also looked at their fathers' occupation, in order to see if the social class they grew up in played a role in the development of schizophrenia.
"[4] Another statement in Fox's study was, in studies done on social class and mental illness, "identify drift as an individual's downward intergenerational social mobility after the onset of mental illness, rather than as residential drift from higher to lower class status areas".
People who are unemployed have been shown to have an increased amount of distress; have more physical health problems, which are often seen to be contributors of depression;[1] and experience more frequent and more uncontrollable life events, which studies have shown increase the risk of developing some form of mental illness.
"A number of community studies conducted in the 1970s reported that mothers who were in financially strained circumstances were more likely to develop depressive symptoms than other women.