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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Brenda Kurz, PhD, MSW and Lisa Werkmeister-Rozas, PhD, MSW. School of Social Work, University of Connecticut, 1798 Asylum Avenue, West Hartford, CT 06117, 860-570-9153, Brenda.Kurz@UConn.edu

As demographics shift and the racial and ethnic composition of the United States continue to build on the already existing admixture of ancestry, researchers are confronting methodological issues concerning racial and ethnic measurement. Some attempt to capture the complexity of race/ethnicity by measuring interactions between race, ethnicity, and variables such as socio-economic status, country of origin, and/or immigration while others argue that race/ethnicity should be replaced by theoretical constructs (e.g., racial identity, racism, stereotype threat, and social categorization) or social index variables that more appropriately capture its complexity. In a recent study of depressive symptomatology (measured by the PrimeMD-PHQ) among 258 ethnically diverse low-income women in the Women, Infant and Children Program, findings based on a social index variable that incorporated race/ethnicity and immigrant status were compared to those based on the more traditional and one dimensional categorization of race/ethnicity, either alone or in interaction with immigrant status. Differences between the Puerto Rican, Latina, and Black subgroups would have been lost without the social index variable. Further, logistic analyses of subthreshold depressive syndrome using the social index variable indicated that the odds for island born Puerto Rican women were significantly greater (5.6) than those of White US born women and better accounted for the data, whereas the analyses by race, immigration status, or the interaction of the two yielded no significant differences. Researchers are encouraged to identify and utilize those factors that explicate differential outcomes associated with being a member of a particular racial or ethnic social group.

Learning Objectives: Participants will be able to

• articulate how the federal government’s categorization of race/ethnicity has evolved over time, corresponding with demographic, political and ideological shifts in society,
• identify problems associated with using the variable “race/ethnicity” in analyses, and
• construct social index variables that better capture the socio-political forces that underlie the variable “race/ethnicity” in their studies.

Keywords: Research Ethics, Ethnicity

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered