Dear Dennis and Colleagues,
This is a comment regarding moving US researchers off ethnic and racial disparities and onto income disparities. Several investigators have proposed in the past replacing racial and ethnic research and focusing on class, income, and wealth. Doing so would substantially decrease the chance of understanding the relationship between population categories (i.e. U.S. racial) and the productions of income and wealth differentials, as well as health, illness and medical disparities.
Most researchers in the social and natural sciences are increasingly agreeing on the social nature of population categories. Some of us have demonstrated the substantial conceptual and methodological problems associated with the application of population categories as variables in health research. However, despite of such methodological limitations, the 60+ percent of articles published in U.S. medical journals have continued to use the categories. In about two thirds of articles, investigators do report research results related or derived from the population categories employed.
The current use of population categories in health research, albeit not producing information about individual characteristics, does provide important information about life in a racialized social environment. The application of population categories and associated stereotypes in U.S. everyday life produce social stratifications. Therefore, class, income, and wealth, although substantially different among U.S. citizens, the stratification becomes further and significantly stratified by population categories.
The point of the story is that in studying health disparities, class, income, and wealth are indeed important factors. In the U.S., and presumably in other places as well, attending to the social stratification produced through use of population categories is equally important. Although population categories are indeed products of social constructions, the effect that these have in everyday life, and of course in the ways in which individuals experience health, illness, and medicine have a substantial and real effect. The challenge that remains is how best to study such complex social factors, particularly given the research limited tools we have in the social and natural sciences.
P. Rafael Hernández-Arias
Department of Sociology
DePaul University
-----Original Message-----
From: Social Determinants of Health [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dennis Raphael
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2006 1:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Minority Health Resources Action Kit for Community Leaders
Is there any way to get the USA off ethnic and racial disprarities and onto
income disparities? :-)
dr
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