In all societies and across all stages of life people who are low in the stratification ladder are less healthy and live shorter than their better educated, richer and more socially respected counterparts (1). Regardless of the exponential growth of worldwide research and publications on social determinants of health within the past 30 years, a comprehensive and conclusive explanation of the social mechanism translating social standing into a health outcome is still missing. Very recently a few important international studies have been published that shed a new light on the mechanism transmitting socioeconomic standing into health outcome (2) (3). Many of them focus on the issue of social mobility and therefore attempt to investigate the controversy between two conflicting hypotheses (4) (5). The first one proposes that early childhood exposure is critical to one's health while the other claims a constant accumulation of health risks over the lifetime (6). All these previous studies, however, yield only fragmentary findings. We propose a broad, both quantitative and qualitative research design that will demonstrate to what extent different types of intergenerational mobility influence health and how exactly this phenomenon takes place. A novel concept applied to the qualitative part of this research is that people not only cope with health exposures (reactive resilience) but also pursue strategies that mitigate the negative impact of their lower position in the stratification system (7). Such pro-active resilience bears a lot of resemblance to the notion of agency.