Highlights of 2011 - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern ...

Social Disparities AND Health
period in the 1980s where it started to narrow, particularly for
African Americans living in the South. IPR economist Jonathan
Guryan and his colleagues traced the gap’s narrowing to an
unexpected source—integration of Southern hospitals in 1965.
From the late 1950s into the mid-1960s, the death rate for
chronic but manageable illness. As part of her Health, Hardship,
and Renewal Study, IPR sociologist and African American
studies researcher Celeste Watkins-Hayes interviewed 30
HIV-positive African American women between 2005 and
2008. In this project’s first published study, she and her coauthors
reveal how nonprofit and government institutions, or
“framing institutions,” play a critical role in helping these women
to cope. These organizations provide conceptual frameworks
for understanding what it means to have HIV, language to talk
about their condition, and resources to begin restructuring
their lives in the wake of a diagnosis. The authors also show
how such institutions help the women to renegotiate their
self-conceptions as black women after receiving another
stigmatizing social marker. The study was written with Jean
Beaman, an IPR postdoctoral fellow, and LaShawnDa Pittman-
Gay, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia State University and a
former IPR graduate research assistant. It was published in
Social Science & Medicine. The project receives support from
the R.W. Johnson Foundation and National Science Foundation.
Redefining Race
on prenatal cigarette exposure, hospital desegregation and cognitive ability,
outcomes. From left: moderator, Kellogg professor, and IPR associate Therese
IPR economist Jonathan Guryan; and MIT economist Michael Greenstone.
black newborns was increasing in the South relative to the
Northeast, yet postneonatal mortality rates plunged almost
immediately after the hospitals integrated. The findings suggest
that early health could be a time to narrow inequalities.
MIT economist Michael Greenstone showed that the number
of days exceeding 90 degrees in the United States will increase
from an average of one per year to 30 by 2100. Examining U.S.
death rates, Greenstone and his colleagues predict that moving
a day from the 50-to-60 degree range into the 90-plus range
translates to about one extra death per 100,000 Americans
annually. In comparison, mortality data from India, a much
poorer country with higher temperatures, indicates the same
change in daily temperature averages leads to a death rate 10
times larger. Since people in India are already dying from high
temperatures, Greenstone predicted they are more likely to
concentrate on raising incomes in the near future rather than
on long-term investments to prevent climate change.
Learning How to Live with HIV
An HIV diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, with individuals
now living for decades thanks to life-saving drug regimens. Yet
many HIV-positive individuals grapple with how to transition
from believing and behaving as though they have been
sentenced to death to interpreting and coping with HIV as a
Decoding the human genome has confirmed that human beings
are not biologically divided into races. Yet in this supposedly
“post-racial” era, race has taken on a new—and disturbing—
guise, driven by profits, politics, and scientific probing, according
to IPR law professor Dorothy Roberts. She tackled this issue
in her most recent book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics,
and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The
New Press, 2011). In her book, Roberts underscores that race
is a social and cultural invention. She reasons that it is not a
biological category that naturally produces health disparities
because of genetic differences, but rather a political category
that has staggering biological consequences because of the
impact of social inequality on people’s health. Key points from
her research highlight this, including how race is being used
in reproductive science, DNA-based criminal databases, and
drug marketing. She points to how the pharmaceutical and
biotech industries are poised to exploit race as a convenient
but unscientific proxy for genetic difference to market new
drugs. Roberts discussed her book in several events over the
year, including at a lecture sponsored by IPR and the YWCA
Evanston/North Shore.
Racial Disparities in Causes of Death
Currently, causal decomposition is the most common method
used to estimate and compare death rates between groups of
people. This method, however, harbors a major flaw, according
to IPR social demographer Quincy Thomas Stewart in an
article for Mathematical Population Studies. It does not account
for the fact that underprivileged groups are more likely to die
from nearly all other causes of death, skewing the results. To
correct this, Stewart developed the “cause-deleted index.” In it,
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