Structural Racism and Quantitative Causal Inference: A Life Course Mediation Framework for Decomposing Racial Health Disparities.

ABSTRACT: Quantitative studies of racial health disparities often use static measures of self-reported race and conventional regression estimators, which critics argue is inconsistent with social-constructivist theories of race, racialization, and racism. We demonstrate an alternative counterfactual approach to explain how multiple racialized systems dynamically shape health over time, examining racial inequities in cardiometabolic risk in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. This framework accounts for the dynamics of time-varying confounding and mediation that is required in operationalizing a "race" variable as part of a social process (racism) rather than a separable, individual characteristic. We decompose the observed disparity into three types of effects: a co

SUBMITTER: Graetz N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11251000 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature