ReviewSocial science & medicine (1982)2014
Challenges of health measurement in studies of health disparities.
Review in Social science & medicine (1982), 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
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- The "long arm of childhood" on mortality in older adulthood in the United States and Brazil: examining the role of educational attainment and differences by gender.American journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Health differences between rural and non-rural Texas counties based on 2023 County Health Rankings.BMC health services research · 2025Article
- Unequal weathering: How immigrants' health advantage vanishes over the life-course.Journal of migration and health · 2025Article
- The Solutions in Health Analytics for Rural Equity Across the Northwest (SHARE-NW) Dashboard for Health Equity in Rural Public Health: Usability Evaluation.JMIR human factors · 2024Article
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- Doctors' recommendations and healthy lifestyle behaviors among individuals with hypertension in Brazil.Preventive medicine reports · 2023Article
- Mind the Gap: What Factors Determine the Worse Health Status of Indigenous Women Relative to Men Living Off-Reserve in Canada?Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2023Article
- Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Geographic Access to Autism Resources Across the US.JAMA network open · 2023Article
- Physical health conditions of the Amish and intervening social mechanisms: an exhaustive narrative review.Ethnicity & health · 2022Review
- A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between housing insecurity and physical health among midlife and aging adults in the United States.SSM - population health · 2022Article
- Effect of Primary Health Care Expenditure on Universal Health Coverage: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa.ClinicoEconomics and outcomes research : CEOR · 2022Article
- The cultural equivalence of measurement in substance use research.Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology · 2021Review
- A Longitudinal Assessment of Risk Factors and Chronic Diseases among Immigrant and Non-Immigrant Adults in Australia.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Relationship between sleep duration and quality and glycated hemoglobin, body mass index, and self-reported health in Marshallese adults.Sleep health · 2021Article
- Medical Education and the Stigmatization of Mental Illness in the Philippines.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2021Article
- Modeling the impact of exposure reductions using multi-stressor epidemiology, exposure models, and synthetic microdata: an application to birthweight in two environmental justice communities.Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Health disparities are increasingly studied in and across a growing array of societies. While novel contexts and comparisons are a promising development, this commentary highlights four challenges to finding appropriate and adequate health measures when making comparisons across groups within a society or across distinctive societies. These challenges affect the accuracy with which we characterize the degree of inequality, limiting possibilities for effectively targeting resources to improve health and reduce disparities. First, comparisons may be challenged by different distributions of disease and second, by variation in the availability and quality of vital events and census data often used to measure health. Third, the comparability of self-reported information about specific health conditions may vary across social groups or societies because of diagnosis bias or diagnosis avoidance. Fourth, self-reported overall health measures or measures of specific symptoms may not be comparable across groups if they use different reference groups or interpret questions or concepts differently. We explain specific issues that make up each type of challenge and show how they may lead to underestimates or inflation of estimated health disparities. We also discuss approaches that have been used to address them in prior research, note where further innovation is needed to solve lingering problems, and make recommendations for improving future research. Many of our examples are drawn from South Africa or the United States, societies characterized by substantial socioeconomic inequality across ethnic groups and wide disparities in many health outcomes, but the issues explored throughout apply to a wide variety of contexts and inquiries.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.