Events

Abstract: The 2020 murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and large racial/ethnic disparities in sickness, hospitalization, and death due to the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about widespread attention to issues of race/ethnicity, racism, and population health in the United States. It is clear that the area of race/ethnicity, racism, and health is finally core to the population sciences, at least for now, and seemingly to science more generally. My presentation focuses on this area of study and is organized around four questions. First, how wide are racial/ethnic disparities in U.S. population health and how are they changing? Second, how is such seemingly straightforward description complicated by issues of population heterogeneity and the complexity of human health? Third, what are the challenging questions we need to pursue in this area of study, particularly as the field begins to seriously grapple with the role of racism in creating and maintaining racial/ethnic disparities in health? Moreover, how—in terms of conceptualization, data collection, and analysis—should we pursue such questions? Here, I draw on an empirical example using data from Waves I-V of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and summarize the work that a team of us are doing in our development of Wave VI of Add Health. I close by making recommendations for what the population sciences should do outside of the research arena with regard to this area of study.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Hilary Term is convened by Dave Kirk and Jennifer Dowd.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.