Disparities at the intersection of marginalized groups
By J. Jackson, David R. Williams, Tyler J. VanderWeele. 2016
148 citations recorded by the source corpus.
PurposeMental health disparities exist across several dimensions of social inequality, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status and gender. Most investigations of health disparities focus on one dimension. Recent calls by researchers argue for studying persons who are marginalized in multiple ways, often from the perspective of intersectionality, a theoretical framework applied to qualitative studies in law, sociology, and psychology. Quantitative adaptations are emerging but there is little guidance as to what measures or methods are helpful.Methods Here, we consider the concept of a joint disparity and its composition, show that this approach can illuminate how outcomes are patterned for social groups that are marginalized across multiple axes of social inequality, and compare the insights gained with that of other measures of additive interaction. We apply these methods to a cohort of young men from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, examining disparities for black men with low early life SES vs. white men with high early life SES across several outcomes that predict mental health, including unemployment, wages, and incarceration.Results and conclusions We report striking disparities in each outcome, but show that the contribution of race, SES, and their intersection varies.
Subfields: Health, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
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In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Prediction-Based Decisions and Fairness: A Catalogue of Choices, Assumptions, and Definitions (2018, background): “Intersectionality has been studied in various quantitative literatures, e.g. in epidemiology [65, 63].”
- Decomposition Analysis to Identify Intervention Targets for Reducing Disparities (2017, unknown): “questions framed with an intersectional focus.(39,40)”