Department of Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health, Box 951772, 650 Charles E. Young Dr., South, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1772, United States.
Department of Research, Charles Drew University, Los Angeles, CA, United States; Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Soc Sci Med. 2010 Jul;71(2):251-258. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.04.008. Epub 2010 Apr 29.
Although social stratification persists in the US, differentially influencing the well-being of ethnically defined groups, ethnicity concepts and their implications for health disparities remain under-examined. Ethnicity is a complex social construct that influences personal identity and group social relations. Ethnic identity, ethnic classification systems, the groupings that compose each system and the implications of assignment to one or another ethnic category are place-, time- and context-specific. In the US, racial stratification uniquely shapes expressions of and understandings about ethnicity. Ethnicity is typically invoked via the term, 'race/ethnicity'; however, it is unclear whether this heralds a shift away from racialization or merely extends flawed racial taxonomies to populations whose cultural and phenotypic diversity challenge traditional racial classification. We propose that ethnicity be conceptualized as a two-dimensional, context-specific, social construct with an attributional dimension that describes group characteristics (e.g., culture, nativity) and a relational dimension that indexes a group's location within a social hierarchy (e.g., minority vs. majority status). This new conceptualization extends prior definitions in ways that facilitate research on ethnicization, social stratification and health inequities. While federal ethnic and racial categories are useful for administrative purposes such as monitoring the inclusion of minorities in research, and traditional ethnicity concepts (e.g., culture) are useful for developing culturally appropriate interventions, our relational dimension of ethnicity is useful for studying the relationships between societal factors and health inequities. We offer this new conceptualization of ethnicity and outline next steps for employing socially meaningful measures of ethnicity in empirical research. As ethnicity is both increasingly complex and increasingly central to social life, improving its conceptualization and measurement is crucial for advancing research on ethnic health inequities.
尽管社会分层在美国仍然存在，对不同族裔群体的福祉产生了影响，但种族概念及其对健康差异的影响仍未得到充分研究。种族是一个复杂的社会建构，影响个人身份和群体社会关系。种族认同、种族分类系统、构成每个系统的群体以及被分配到一个或另一个种族类别的含义是特定于地点、时间和背景的。在美国，种族分层独特地塑造了对种族的表达和理解。种族通常通过“种族/族裔”这一术语来调用；然而，目前尚不清楚这是否标志着种族化的转变，还是仅仅将有缺陷的种族分类法扩展到那些文化和表型多样性挑战传统种族分类的人群。我们提出，将种族概念化为一个具有归因维度和关系维度的二维、特定于情境的社会建构，归因维度描述群体特征（例如，文化、原籍国），关系维度则描述群体在社会等级制度中的位置（例如，少数群体与多数群体地位）。这种新的概念化以促进关于种族化、社会分层和健康不平等的研究的方式扩展了先前的定义。虽然联邦种族和族裔类别对于监测少数群体在研究中的参与等管理目的很有用，而传统的种族概念（例如文化）对于制定文化上适当的干预措施很有用，但我们的种族关系维度对于研究社会因素与健康不平等之间的关系很有用。我们提供了这种新的种族概念化，并概述了在实证研究中采用具有社会意义的种族衡量标准的下一步措施。由于种族既越来越复杂，又越来越成为社会生活的核心，因此改进其概念化和衡量标准对于推进关于种族健康不平等的研究至关重要。
