Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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Author: search.filters.author.Balsa, Ana ISubject: search.filters.subject.Prejudice

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    Prejudice, clinical uncertainty and stereotyping as sources of health disparities.
    (2003) Balsa, Ana I; McGuire, Thomas G
    Disparities in health can result from the clinical encounter between a doctor and a patient. This paper studies three possible mechanisms: prejudice of doctors in the form of being less willing to interact with members of minority groups, clinical uncertainty associated with doctors' differential interpretation of symptoms from minority patients or from doctor's distinct priors across races, and stereotypes doctors hold about health-related behavior of minority patients. Within a unified conceptual framework, we show how all three can lead to disparities in health and health services use. We also show that the effect of social policy depends critically on the underlying cause of disparities.