Full Citation
Title: Racial Disparities in Self-Rated Health: Trends, Explanatory Factors, and the Changing Role of Socio-Demographics
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2014
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: This paper uses multiple U.S. National Health Interview Surveys (N=1,513,097) to describe and explain temporal patterns in racial health disparities using models that simultaneously consider the unique effects of age, period, and cohort. First, we employ cross-classified random effects age-period-cohort (APC) models to understand the patterns of self-rated health disparities over time. Second, we use decomposition models to understand how socioeconomic shifts in cohort composition explain the age and period adjusted racial disparities in successive birth cohorts. Third, we examine the extent to which exogenous conditions at the time of birth can explain disparities. Our results show that race disparities increase through the 1935 cohort for women, falling thereafter; disparities for men exhibit a similar pattern but begin their overall decline with cohorts born earlier in the century. Differences in socioeconomic composition consistently contribute to disparities across cohorts; notably, disparities in marital status emerge as an increasingly important predictor across cohorts for women whereas disparities in employment emerge as increasingly salient across cohorts of men. Finally, our cohort characteristic models suggest that cohort economic conditions (percent large family, farm or Southern birth) reduce both male and female disparities in health. Poor macro-economic conditions around the time of the great depression inflated disparities for those cohorts while more favorable conditions following World War II suppressed disparities. Relative cohort size had no impact on cohort disparities in health.
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Masters, Ryan K.; Fitch, Brian K.; Lin, Shih-Fan; Beck, Audrey N.; Hummer, Robert A.
Periodical (Full): Social science & medicine
Issue:
Volume:
Pages: 1-49
Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS Health Surveys - NHIS
Topics: Health, Race and Ethnicity
Countries: