Embodying Inequality: A Review of Concepts, Measures, and Methods for Studying Health Consequences of Discrimination

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Krieger
Keyword(s):  
Population Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Health Research ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Cumulative Exposure ◽  
Health Consequences ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Economic Level ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The Individual

Investigating effects of discrimination upon health requires clear concepts, methods, and measures. At issue are both economic consequences of discrimination and accumulated insults arising from everyday and at times violent experiences of being treated as a second-class citizen, at each and every economic level. Guidelines for epidemiologic investigations and other public health research on ways people embody racism, sexism, and other forms of social inequality, however, are not well defined, as research in this area is in its infancy. Employing an ecosocial framework, this article accordingly reviews definitions and patterns of discrimination within the United States; evaluates analytic strategies and instruments researchers have developed to study health effects of different kinds of discrimination; and delineates diverse pathways by which discrimination can harm health, both outright and by distorting production of epidemiologic knowledge about determinants of population health. Three methods of studying health consequences of discrimination are examined (indirect; direct, at the individual level, in relation to personal experiences of discrimination; at the population level, such as via segregation), and recommendations are provided for developing research instruments to measure acute and cumulative exposure to different aspects of discrimination.

Race in the Biomedical Sciences

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Root
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Population Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Morbidity And Mortality ◽  
Diagnosis And Treatment ◽  
Biomedical Sciences ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Individual

Racial categories are used in the biomedical sciences both at the population and individual level. At the population level, race is used in fields like epidemiology, to describe and explain variations in the rate or risk of morbidity and mortality within the United States, and at the individual level, race is used in the hospital and clinic, in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Both uses are controversial and raise questions about the nature and importance of racial categories, such as which uses benefit individuals and which benefit groups.

scholarly journals Blood Pressure Trajectories Across the Life Course

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-241
Author(s):  
Norrina B Allen ◽  
Sadiya S Khan
Keyword(s):  
Blood Pressure ◽  
Measurement Errors ◽  
Clinical Care ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Cumulative Exposure ◽  
Older Adulthood ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Level Group ◽  
Improve Health

Abstract High blood pressure (BP) is a strong modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Longitudinal BP patterns themselves may reflect the burden of risk and vascular damage due to prolonged cumulative exposure to high BP levels. Current studies have begun to characterize BP patterns as a trajectory over an individual’s lifetime. These BP trajectories take into account the absolute BP levels as well as the slope of BP changes throughout the lifetime thus incorporating longitudinal BP patterns into a single metric. Methodologic issues that need to be considered when examining BP trajectories include individual-level vs. population-level group-based modeling, use of distinct but complementary BP metrics (systolic, diastolic, mean arterial, mid, and pulse pressure), and potential for measurement errors related to varied settings, devices, and number of readings utilized. There appear to be very specific developmental periods during which divergent BP trajectories may emerge, specifically adolescence, the pregnancy period, and older adulthood. Lifetime BP trajectories are impacted by both individual-level and community-level factors and have been associated with incident hypertension, multimorbidity (CVD, renal disease, cognitive impairment), and overall life expectancy. Key unanswered questions remain around the additive predictive value of BP trajectories, intergenerational contributions to BP patterns (in utero BP exposure), and potential genetic drivers of BP patterns. The next phase in understanding BP trajectories needs to focus on how best to incorporate this knowledge into clinical care to reduce the burden of hypertensive-related outcomes and improve health equity.

A Discussion of Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird’s Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-210
Author(s):  
Michael Leo Owens
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Behavioral Norm ◽  
Black Political Behavior

Charge: As Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird note, collectively more than 80% of African Americans self-identify as Democrats according to surveys, and no Republican presidential candidate has won more than 13% of the Black vote since 1968. This is true despite the fact that at the individual level many African Americans are increasingly politically moderate and even conservative. Against this backdrop, what explains the enduring nature of African American support for the Democratic Party? In Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, White and Laird answer this question by developing the concept of “racialized social constraint,” a unifying behavioral norm meant to empower African Americans as a group and developed through a shared history of struggle against oppression and for freedom and equality. White and Laird consider the historical development of this norm, how it is enforced, and its efficacy both in creating party loyalty and as a path to Black political power in the United States. On the cusp of perhaps the most consequential presidential election in American history, one for which African American turnout was crucial, we asked a range of leading political scientists to assess the relative strengths, weaknesses, and ramifications of this argument.

Canada’s changing innovation landscape

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Md. Razib Alam ◽  
Bonwoo Koo ◽  
Brian Paul Cozzarin
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Destination Country ◽  
Firm Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Patent Classification ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Our objective is to study Canada’s patenting activity over time in aggregate terms by destination country, by assignee and destination country, and by diversification by country of destination. We collect bibliographic patent data from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. We identify 19,957 matched Canada–US patents, 34,032 Canada-only patents, and 43,656 US-only patents from 1980 to 2014. Telecommunications dominates in terms of International Patent Classification technologies for US-only and Canada–US patents. At the firm level, the greatest number of matched Canada–US patents were granted in the field of telecommunications, at the university level in pharmaceuticals, at the government level in control and instrumentation technology, and at the individual level in civil engineering. We use entropy to quantify technological diversification and find that diversification indices decline over time for Canada and the USA; however, all US indices decline at a faster rate.

scholarly journals Migration, acculturation, and the maintenance of between-group cultural variation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Learning Processes

AbstractHow do migration and acculturation (i.e. psychological or behavioral change resulting from migration) affect within- and between-group cultural variation? Here I answer this question by drawing analogies between genetic and cultural evolution. Population genetic models show that migration rapidly breaks down between-group genetic structure. In cultural evolution, however, migrants or their descendants can acculturate to local behaviors via social learning processes such as conformity, potentially preventing migration from eliminating between-group cultural variation. An analysis of the empirical literature on migration suggests that acculturation is common, with second and subsequent migrant generations shifting, sometimes substantially, towards the cultural values of the adopted society. Yet there is little understanding of the individual-level dynamics that underlie these population-level shifts. To explore this formally, I present models quantifying the effect of migration and acculturation on between-group cultural variation, for both neutral and costly cooperative traits. In the models, between-group cultural variation, measured using F statistics, is eliminated by migration and maintained by conformist acculturation. The extent of acculturation is determined by the strength of conformist bias and the number of demonstrators from whom individuals learn. Acculturation is countered by assortation, the tendency for individuals to preferentially interact with culturally-similar others. Unlike neutral traits, cooperative traits can additionally be maintained by payoff-biased social learning, but only in the presence of strong sanctioning institutions. Overall, the models show that surprisingly little conformist acculturation is required to maintain realistic amounts of between-group cultural diversity. While these models provide insight into the potential dynamics of acculturation and migration in cultural evolution, they also highlight the need for more empirical research into the individual-level learning biases that underlie migrant acculturation.

scholarly journals What happens when the nuclear power plant goes? Social and economic consequences of dismantling for the site and its population

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 265-266
Author(s):  
Caroline Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Operating Time ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Intention To Leave ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Power Station ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Individual

Abstract. This project deals with the question of what the overall social and economic consequences of dismantling a nuclear power station are for the population and the site. Various disciplines and specialist fields are concerned with questions that touch on the topic of dismantling nuclear technical facilities; however, there are so far no research projects that examined these processes from social scientific, geographic and engineering scientific perspectives. This article concentrates predominantly on the former perspective of the dismantling. Within the framework of this project the affected population and experts from the communities were asked how they deal with the dismantling of the nuclear power stations, which were triggered by the rapid change in energy policy following the accident in Fukushima in 2011. It became clear that there were various strategies for dealing with this process depending on the location. This was the reason to follow up the question of coping with this process at different locations. It could be shown, for example, that the consequences of this event were essentially determined by how the community was already positioned beforehand, e.g. whether the economic situation was a monostructure or whether long-term considerations about the future had already been made during the operating time of the power station. At the individual level, the “prerequisites” in the sense of individual value orientation and the spatially related identity, were also essentially responsible for how the risks of the dismantling and the further development of the community were perceived and evaluated. Furthermore, it was compiled from where the people extracted their information, which sources had a high or low credibility, which worries they have with respect to the near future and whether they have the intention to leave the community. In this project it became clear that there were examples of best practice with respect to dealing with this rapid and fundamental change at the locations.

scholarly journals The Importance of Individual Memories of Slovenian Emigrants When Interpreting Slovenian Emigration Processes

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-190
Author(s):  
Mojca Ilc Klun
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
General Data ◽  
Place Of Origin ◽  
The Individual

Slovenian emigration is often presented with a general overview in which general data and statistical facts prevail, while the individual experiences and memories of Slovenian emigrants are omitted from these descriptions. In the study, which was conducted using a biographical-narrative methodological approach among members of the Slovenian diaspora from the United States of America, Canada and Australia, we were interested in the personal experiences and memories of those who emigrated from Slovenia themselves, or whose ancestors did. Through those life stories and memories, we can illustrate Slovenian emigration processes in such a way that people would better understand global migration processes. In the article we present three real life stories of members of the Slovenian diaspora, their individual memories and perceptions of their place of origin, homeland, the memories of emigration and immigration processes and memories of integration to the new social environments.

scholarly journals General intelligence disentangled via a generality metric for natural and artificial intelligence

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
José Hernández-Orallo ◽  
Bao Sheng Loe ◽  
Lucy Cheke ◽  
Fernando Martínez-Plumed ◽  
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh
Keyword(s):  
Task Difficulty ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
General Intelligence ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Cognitive Efficiency ◽  
Comprehensive Performance ◽  
Individual Measure ◽  
Level Of Difficulty ◽  
The Individual

AbstractSuccess in all sorts of situations is the most classical interpretation of general intelligence. Under limited resources, however, the capability of an agent must necessarily be limited too, and generality needs to be understood as comprehensive performance up to a level of difficulty. The degree of generality then refers to the way an agent’s capability is distributed as a function of task difficulty. This dissects the notion of general intelligence into two non-populational measures, generality and capability, which we apply to individuals and groups of humans, other animals and AI systems, on several cognitive and perceptual tests. Our results indicate that generality and capability can decouple at the individual level: very specialised agents can show high capability and vice versa. The metrics also decouple at the population level, and we rarely see diminishing returns in generality for those groups of high capability. We relate the individual measure of generality to traditional notions of general intelligence and cognitive efficiency in humans, collectives, non-human animals and machines. The choice of the difficulty function now plays a prominent role in this new conception of generality, which brings a quantitative tool for shedding light on long-standing questions about the evolution of general intelligence and the evaluation of progress in Artificial General Intelligence.

scholarly journals Ecology and Prediction of Compensatory Growth: From Theory to Application in Forestry

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao Li ◽  
Hugh Barclay ◽  
Bernard Roitberg ◽  
Robert Lalonde
Keyword(s):  
Compensatory Growth ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Common Phenomenon ◽  
Partial Mortality ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
Dependent Model ◽  
Accelerated Growth ◽  
The Individual

Compensatory growth has been observed in forests, and it also appears as a common phenomenon in biology. Though it sometimes takes different names, the essential meanings are the same, describing the accelerated growth of organisms when recovering from a period of unfavorable conditions such as tissue damage at the individual level and partial mortality at the population level. Diverse patterns of compensatory growth have been reported in the literature, ranging from under-, to compensation-induced-equality, and to over-compensation. In this review and synthesis, we provide examples of analogous compensatory growth from different fields, clarify different meanings of it, summarize its current understanding and modeling efforts, and argue that it is possible to develop a state-dependent model under the conceptual framework of compensatory growth, aimed at explaining and predicting diverse observations according to different disturbances and environmental conditions. When properly applied, compensatory growth can benefit different industries and human society in various forms.

scholarly journals Opposite outcomes of coinfection at individual and population scales

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (29) ◽  
pp. 7545-7550 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin E. Gorsich ◽  
Rampal S. Etienne ◽  
Jan Medlock ◽  
Brianna R. Beechler ◽  
Johannie M. Spaan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Reproduction Number ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
African Buffalo ◽  
Global Public Health ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Secondary Infections ◽  
The Individual

Coinfecting parasites and pathogens remain a leading challenge for global public health due to their consequences for individual-level infection risk and disease progression. However, a clear understanding of the population-level consequences of coinfection is lacking. Here, we constructed a model that includes three individual-level effects of coinfection: mortality, fecundity, and transmission. We used the model to investigate how these individual-level consequences of coinfection scale up to produce population-level infection patterns. To parameterize this model, we conducted a 4-y cohort study in African buffalo to estimate the individual-level effects of coinfection with two bacterial pathogens, bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and brucellosis, across a range of demographic and environmental contexts. At the individual level, our empirical results identified bTB as a risk factor for acquiring brucellosis, but we found no association between brucellosis and the risk of acquiring bTB. Both infections were associated with reductions in survival and neither infection was associated with reductions in fecundity. The model reproduced coinfection patterns in the data and predicted opposite impacts of coinfection at individual and population scales: Whereas bTB facilitated brucellosis infection at the individual level, our model predicted the presence of brucellosis to have a strong negative impact on bTB at the population level. In modeled populations where brucellosis was present, the endemic prevalence and basic reproduction number (R0) of bTB were lower than in populations without brucellosis. Therefore, these results provide a data-driven example of competition between coinfecting pathogens that occurs when one pathogen facilitates secondary infections at the individual level.

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