Do You Want to See a Doctor for That? Contextualizing Racial and Ethnic Differences in Care-Seeking

Abstract

This study represents a systematic analysis of the ways individual, social, and structural context may account for racial and ethnic differences in seeking medical care. We build on healthcare seeking literature by including more comprehensive measures of social relationships, healthcare and system-level characteristics, and exploring a wide variety of health beliefs and expectations. Further, our study investigates care seeking among multiple understudied racial and ethnic groups. We find that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to say they would seek healthcare than whites, suggesting that guidelines promoting the elicitation and understanding of patient preferences in the context of the clinical interaction is an important step toward reducing utilization disparities. These findings also underscore the notion that health policy should go further to address the broader social factors relating to care-seeking in the first place.

Citation

Walton, E. and Anthony, D.L. (2017), "Do You Want to See a Doctor for That? Contextualizing Racial and Ethnic Differences in Care-Seeking", Health and Health Care Concerns Among Women and Racial and Ethnic Minorities (Research in the Sociology of Health Care, Vol. 35), Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 249-278. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0275-495920170000035013

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