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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2001 - 20034

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Author: search.filters.author.Krieger, NancySubject: search.filters.subject.Public Health

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    The ostrich, the albatross, and public health: an ecosocial perspective--or why an explicit focus on health consequences of discrimination and deprivation is vital for good science and public health practice.
    (2001) Krieger, Nancy
    Concern for social inequalities in health in the United States is increasingly becoming part of the mainstream public health and health research agenda. Responding to organized efforts within and outside the health sector, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is supporting programs dedicated to eliminating social disparities in health, and within DHHS, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are supporting research into health disparities. The NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health (founded in 1990) and the new National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (including socioeconomic disparities) are, for example, focusing attention on multiple health outcomes in relation to specified social determinants, rather than parsing out ailments solely by body parts. At issue are ways in which population patterns of health, disease, and well-being, from conception to death, reflect societal conditions, including social inequality, across the lifecourse.
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    Changing to the 2000 Standard Million: Are Declining Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Inequalities in Health Real Progress or Statistical Illusion?
    (2001) Krieger, Nancy; Williams, David R.
    Objectives. This study determined the effects of changing from the 1940 to the 2000 standard million on monitoring socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequalities in health. Methods. Using the 1940, 1970, and 2000 standard million, we calculated and compared ageadjusted rates for selected health outcomes stratified by socioeconomic level. Results. Changing from the 1940 to the 2000 standard million markedly reduced the age-adjusted relative risks for self-reported fair or poor health status of poor Americans compared with high-income Americans. Conclusions. Public health researchers and practitioners should give serious consideration to the implications of the change to the 2000 standard million for monitoring social inequalities in health.
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    Theories for social epidemiology in the 21st century: An ecosocial perspective
    (2001) Krieger, Nancy
    In social epidemiology, to speak of theory is simultaneously to speak of society and biology. It is, I will argue, to speak of embodiment. At issue is how we literally incorporate, biologically, the world around us, a world in which we simultaneously are but one biological species among many—and one whose labour and ideas literally have transformed the face of this earth. To conceptualize and elucidate the myriad social and biological processes resulting in embodiment and its manifestation in populations' epidemiological profiles, we need theory. This is because theory helps us structure our ideas, so as to explain causal connections between specified phenomena within and across specified domains by using interrelated sets of ideas whose plausibility can be tested by human action and thought.1–3 Grappling with notions of causation, in turn, raises not only complex philosophical issues but also, in the case of social epidemiology, issues of accountability and agency: simply invoking abstract notions of ‘society’ and disembodied ‘genes’ will not suffice. Instead, the central question becomes: who and what is responsible for population patterns of health, disease, and well-being, as manifested in present, past and changing social inequalities in health?
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    Place, Space, and Health: GIS and Epidemiology
    (2003) Krieger, Nancy
    Place. Area. Neighborhood. Latitude. Longitude. Distance. These geographic terms are increasingly finding their way into the epidemiologic literature, as advances in geographic information system (GIS) technology make it ever easier to connect spatially referenced physical and social phenomena to population patterns of health, disease, and well-being.1-3 Indeed, links between location and health have long captured the imagination of perceptive observers. Consider the Hippocratic treatise, “Airs, Waters, and Places,” written about 2,400 years ago, which roundly (and rather deterministically) declared: “You will find, as a general rule, that the constitutions and habits of a people follows the nature of the land where they live.”4, p. 168 Early 19th century research decisive to epidemiology’s development as a discipline5 likewise looked to geography to discern etiologic clues.