Reference no: EM133312184

Assignment:

The socioeconomic status model posits that racial and ethnic health disparities come from socioeconomic inequities, as race or ethnicity and SES are strongly correlated due to a long history of racialized oppression.

"In general, controlling for SES fails to account completely for racial and ethnic disparities, despite leading to a reduction in the magnitude of group differences. The failure of SES controls to account for racial or ethnic differences has then, in turn, been used as "evidence" of some kind of residual racial-genetic effect. As Kaufman and colleagues (1997) show, however, such an inference is almost never warranted because of the problems associated with trying to untangle race, ethnicity, and SES. Various forms of residual confounding occur, which in turn render an inference regarding some kind of racial-genetic effect unlikely, even after controlling for SES (see also Davey Smith 2000).

"Some researchers have argued that the confounding of SES and racial disparities is a function of the wider distribution of risky health behaviors among lower class people, such as those behaviors reviewed in the previous section (Liu et al. 1996, Stamler et al. 2003). This again is an argument that race or ethnicity is confounded with SES; however, as shown above, controlling for health behaviors does not explain racial and ethnic health disparities.

"More promising directions in research on SES examine the effect of residence in low-income communities on health (Williams & Collins 2001), as well as how SES may moderate racial or ethnic differences (Acevedo-Garcia et al. 2005)." (Dressler et al 2005:238)

Can socioeconomic effects and racial effects on health be untangled (meaning, can we separate the effects from one another)? Are socioeconomic and racial effects on health enough to explain racial or ethnic disparities?