Race, Socioeconomic Status and Health: Complexities, Ongoing Challenges and Research Opportunities

By David R. Williams, S. Mohammed, Jacinta P. Leavell, C. Collins. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2010

1,395 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides an overview of racial variations in health and shows that differences in socioeconomic status (SES) across racial groups are a major contributor to racial disparities in health. However, race reflects multiple dimensions of social inequality and individual and household indicators of SES capture relevant but limited aspects of this phenomenon. Research is needed that will comprehensively characterize the critical pathogenic features of social environments and identify how they combine with each other to affect health over the life course. Migration history and status are also important predictors of health and research is needed that will enhance understanding of the complex ways in which race, SES, and immigrant status combine to affect health. Fully capturing the role of race in health also requires rigorous examination of the conditions under which medical care and genetic factors can contribute to racial and SES differences in health. The paper identifies research priorities in all of these areas.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78c1eade8566303c512b0209200a516495ebef9a

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Citations in the corpus

Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity (2017, background): “Moreover, race and ethnicity are extremely salient factors when examining health inequity (Bell and Lee, 2011; Smedley et al., 2008; Williams et al., 2010).”
Do no harm: a roadmap for responsible machine learning for health care (2019, background): “Proposed reporting guidelines developed by the community provide a good starting point for the information to include in a manuscript 11 .”
Understanding Associations between Race, Socioeconomic Status and Health: Patterns and Prospects (2016, positive): “…poverty among racial minorities is concurrent with a greater concentration of other negative risk factors than it is among Whites and how multiple types of stressors combine at various points across the life course and accumulate to influence later health disparities (Williams et al., 2010).”
Understanding Racial/ethnic Disparities in Health: Sociological Contributions (2010, background): “Other research reveals that African Americans and American Indians have higher age-specific death rates than whites from birth through retirement (Williams et al. 2010).”
The social determinants of health: coming of age. (2011, background): “Surprisingly, some researchers—albeit not many— have found poorer health among disadvantaged individuals living in relatively advantaged neighborhoods (85, 89, 120), possibly because of adverse psychological effects of feeling worse off than one’s neighbors and/or stronger social ties or reduced exp”
Decomposition Analysis to Identify Intervention Targets for Reducing Disparities (2017, background): “Our ability to account for SES is also limited by the fact that increases in SES do not necessarily translate into the same gains for blacks and whites.(21) Furthermore, our”