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- Page navigation anchor for RE: Using vulnerability indices to improve our measurement of structural racism in health services researchRE: Using vulnerability indices to improve our measurement of structural racism in health services research
In their article, Lett et al eloquently discuss the limitations of using race as a proxy for structural and individual racism and make recommendations for the public health and medical communities to consider when designing health sciences research (1). One of their recommendations includes using information from outside data sources (examples given include the US Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) databases) to better understand the differences seen between racial and ethnic groups within the context of other measures of structural racism. The goal of this reply is to explore how disadvantage indices (DI) may help further this goal.
DIs are measures designed to capture the relative advantage or disadvantage of groups of people based on a subset of metrics within a defined geography. Two of the most commonly used examples of DIs include the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) (2) and the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) (3,4). The SVI and ADI both characterize four domains (or themes) of social vulnerability based on combinations of census variables. The SVI measures socioeconomic status, housing type/transportation, household characteristics, and racial and ethnic minority status per unit of geography. While similar, the ADI uses census variables to characterize the themes of education, income/employment, housing, and household characteristics. Many of the included variables, if not all, are in some way influenced by the forces of i...
Show MoreCompeting Interests: None declared.