Opening the black box of segregation : structures of racial health disparities
Abigail A. Sewell (Author), Bernice A. Pescosolido (Degree supervisor), Indiana University, Bloomington Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington (Degree granting institution)
Contextual theories of racial health disparities suggest that structural forms of racial discrimination will be linked to poorer health outcomes. However, recent studies of the antecedents of racial residential segregation indicate that racial disparities in access to mortgage loans is linked to better health outcomes or not associated with well-being at all. These quizzical findings provide an unusual opportunity to integrate disparate theoretical frameworks of racial health disparities and to advance multilevel studies of individual and racial inequality. To unravel this paradox, I propose and test a multilevel root cause theory of racial inequality in well-being---the racism-race reification process (R3p), which holds that institutional structures of racism are linked to racial health disparities by way of the deterioration of distal and proximate social, built, and physical environments and the ghettoization of racially and ethnically marginalized youth into disadvantaged neighborhoods. Compiling data from the Home Mortgage Discrimination Act, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and the Neighborhood Change Database, this dissertation evaluates the direct and indirect pathways that link racial and geographical disparities in mortgage lending to racial inequalities in poor/fair general health, acute physical symptoms, obesity, lead poisoning, asthma, and ear infections among youth. The analysis indicates that the effects of lending disparities are not uniform across all forms of illness. Although lending disparities do not attenuate racial health disparities, they are implicated in the indirect pathways that link racial health disparities to ethnoracial residential segregation, poor neighborhood quality, and risky household environments. By synthesizing insights from sociological approaches to race, illness, and wealth inequality, this dissertation locates independent sources of illness deprivation for youth that are related to the political economic manifestations of race and racism, which themselves are linked together in a degenerative chain of mechanisms that impinge upon the well-being of individuals
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2013
Dissertation Abstracts International
Indiana University ; ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, [Bloomington, Indiana], Ann Arbor, 2013