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 - 20093

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Author: search.filters.author.Krieger, NancySubject: search.filters.subject.epidemiology

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    Epi + demos + cracy: linking political systems and priorities to the magnitude of health inequities--evidence, gaps, and a research agenda.
    (2009) Beckfield, Jason; Krieger, Nancy
    A new focus within both social epidemiology and political sociology investigates how political systems and priorities shape health inequities. To advance-and better integrate-research on political determinants of health inequities, the authors conducted a systematic search of the ISI Web of Knowledge and PubMed databases and identified 45 studies, commencing in 1992, that explicitly and empirically tested, in relation to an a priori political hypothesis, for either 1) changes in the magnitude of health inequities or 2) significant cross-national differences in the magnitude of health inequities. Overall, 84% of the studies focused on the global North, and all clustered around 4 political factors: 1) the transition to a capitalist economy; 2) neoliberal restructuring; 3) welfare states; and 4) political incorporation of subordinated racial/ethnic, indigenous, and gender groups. The evidence suggested that the first 2 factors probably increase health inequities, the third is inconsistently related, and the fourth helps reduce them. In this review, the authors critically summarize these studies' findings, consider methodological limitations, and propose a research agenda-with careful attention to spatiotemporal scale, level, time frame (e.g., life course, historical generation), choice of health outcomes, inclusion of polities, and specification of political mechanisms-to address the enormous gaps in knowledge that were identified.
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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.