Environmental Health Disparities: A Framework Integrating Psychosocial and Environmental Concepts

By G. Gee, D. Payne-Sturges. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2004

830 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although it is often acknowledged that social and environmental factors interact to produce racial and ethnic environmental health disparities, it is still unclear how this occurs. Despite continued controversy, the environmental justice movement has provided some insight by suggesting that disadvantaged communities face greater likelihood of exposure to ambient hazards. The exposure–disease paradigm has long suggested that differential “vulnerability” may modify the effects of toxicants on biological systems. However, relatively little work has been done to specify whether racial and ethnic minorities may have greater vulnerability than do majority populations and, further, what these vulnerabilities may be. We suggest that psychosocial stress may be the vulnerability factor that links social conditions with environmental hazards. Psychosocial stress can lead to acute and chronic changes in the functioning of body systems (e.g., immune) and also lead directly to illness. In this article we present a multidisciplinary framework integrating these ideas. We also argue that residential segregation leads to differential experiences of community stress, exposure to pollutants, and access to community resources. When not counterbalanced by resources, stressors may lead to heightened vulnerability to environmental hazards.

Subfields: Health, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/011b27d61fcaa1ee5bddea07a570ad2959543634

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Citations in the corpus

Towards a critical race methodology in algorithmic fairness (2019, positive): “While earlier studies of the social determinants of health tend to center individual and interpersonal racialized experiences, this new paradigm shifts focus to the institutional and structural conditions that shape racial disparities in health [44, 45, 110, 118].”
STRUCTURAL RACISM AND HEALTH INEQUITIES (2011, background): “This rationale has been well articulated for residential segregation (Acevedo-Garcia 2000; Gee and Payne-Sturges, 2004; Williams and Collins, 2001) but can be extended to other forms of segregation.”
Disparities and access to healthy food in the United States: A review of food deserts literature. (2010, background): “These disparities are believed to be associated with factors, including residential segregation, poverty and neighborhood deprivation (Gee and Payne-Sturges, 2004), which can lead to adverse health outcomes.”
Green space as a buffer between stressful life events and health. (2010, background): “Traditionally, this research has focused mostly on sociological and psychosocial factors such as social cohesion, social capital and sense of community (Gee & Payne-Sturges, 2004).”
Multiple environmental burdens and neighborhood-related health of city residents (2012, neutral): “Moreover, research findings suggest that such resources may counterbalance the psychological effects of ambient stressors in urban neighborhoods (see Gee & Payne-Sturges, 2004, for a review; Leslie & Cerin, 2008).”