Departments of African American Studies and Sociology, College of Letters and Science, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
Department of Public Health Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Elon University, Elon, NC 27244, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Jul 27;19(15):9166. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19159166.
After more than a century of research and debate, the scientific community has yet to reach agreement on the principal causes of racialized disparities in population health. This debate currently centers on the degree to which "race residuals" are a result of unobserved differences in the social context or unobserved differences in population characteristics. The comparative study of native and foreign-born Black populations represents a quasi-experimental design where race is "held constant". Such studies present a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of the social determinants of population health disparities. Since native and foreign-born Black populations occupy different sociocultural locations, and since populations with greater African ancestry have greater genetic diversity, comparative studies of these populations will advance our understanding of the complex relationship between sociocultural context, population characteristics and health outcomes. Therefore, we offer a conceptual framing for the comparative study of native and foreign-born Blacks along with a review of 208 studies that compare the mental and physical health of these populations. Although there is some complexity, especially with respect to mental health, the overall pattern is that foreign-born Blacks have better health outcomes than native-born Blacks. After reviewing these studies, we conclude with suggestions for future studies in this promising area of social and medical research.
经过一个多世纪的研究和辩论，科学界尚未就人口健康中种族差异的主要原因达成一致。这场辩论目前集中在“种族残余”在多大程度上是社会背景中未观察到的差异或人口特征中未观察到的差异的结果。对本地和外国出生的黑人人口的比较研究代表了一种准实验设计，其中“种族”保持不变。这些研究为我们更好地理解人口健康差异的社会决定因素提供了独特的机会。由于本地和外国出生的黑人人口处于不同的社会文化环境中，并且具有更大非洲血统的人群具有更大的遗传多样性，因此对这些人群的比较研究将增进我们对社会文化背景、人口特征和健康结果之间复杂关系的理解。因此，我们提供了一个概念框架，用于对本地和外国出生的黑人进行比较研究，并对 208 项比较这些人群心理健康和身体健康的研究进行了综述。尽管存在一些复杂性，尤其是在心理健康方面，但总体模式是，外国出生的黑人比本地出生的黑人有更好的健康结果。在回顾这些研究之后，我们对这一有前途的社会和医学研究领域提出了未来研究的建议。
