Office of Analysis and Epidemiology, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, 3311 Toledo Rd, Hyattsville, MD 20782, USA.
Health Serv Res. 2010 Oct;45(5 Pt 2):1489-507. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-6773.2010.01143.x. Epub 2010 Aug 2.
To describe measurement challenges and strategies in identifying and analyzing health disparities and inequities.
We discuss the limitations of existing data sources for measuring health disparities and inequities, describe current strategies to address those limitations, and explore the potential of emerging strategies.
Larger national sample sizes are necessary to identify disparities for major population subgroups. Collecting self-reported race and granular ethnicity data may reduce some measurement errors, but it raises other methodological questions. The assessment of health inequities presents particular challenges, requiring analysis of the interactive effects of multiple determinants of health. Indirect estimation and modeling methods are likely to be important tools for estimating health disparities and inequities for the foreseeable future.
Interdisciplinary training and collaborative research models will be essential for future disparities research. Evaluation of evolving methodologies for assessing health disparities should be a priority for health services researchers in the next decade.
描述在识别和分析健康差异和不平等方面的测量挑战和策略。
我们讨论了现有数据源在衡量健康差异和不平等方面的局限性,描述了目前解决这些局限性的策略,并探讨了新兴策略的潜力。
为了确定主要人口亚组的差异,需要更大的全国样本量。收集自我报告的种族和更详细的族裔数据可能会减少一些测量误差,但也会引发其他方法学问题。评估健康不平等带来了特殊的挑战,需要分析多种健康决定因素的相互作用效应。间接估计和建模方法可能是未来可预见的估计健康差异和不平等的重要工具。
跨学科培训和合作研究模式对于未来的差异研究至关重要。评估评估健康差异的不断发展的方法应成为未来十年卫生服务研究人员的优先事项。