Abstract
In line with Wilkinson’s theory on inequality and health, this study simultaneously analyses self-directed and interpersonal violence among men in a Stockholm birth cohort born in 1953 with respect to their early life experiences of stress, their lack of social connectedness and their relative deprivation. Multinomial logistic regressions with cluster-robust variance estimates were used. Self-directed violence was found to be related to self-rated loneliness and non-membership of voluntary associations but not to a lack of friendship in school at the age of 12–13, while the opposite was shown to be true for interpersonal violence. Growing up in a family that received means-tested social assistance at least once during the period 1953–1965 was taken as an objective indicator of relative deprivation and proved to be correlated with both self-directed and interpersonal violence. Disadvantaged social comparison at the age of 12–13, taken as a subjective indicator of relative deprivation, was only statistically related to a subsequent risk of interpersonal violence. It is suggested that different types of social connectedness and relative deprivation, respectively, explain these different patterns of violence. Furthermore, the study speculates on the possibility of frequent social comparison itself being a factor to consider when trying understanding violence in general.