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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between occupational degree requirement and mortality between ethnic groups in a cohort of urban workers.

The study included 118,606 health-insured full-time workers from the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC). Mortality rates (MR) and mortality rate ratios (MRR) were calculated for major ethnic categories. Estimates were adjusted for age, sex, and occupational degree requirement.

Prior to adjustment for degree requirement, mortality rates (MRs) by ethnic groups in the Health and Hospitals Corporation were in line with national estimates: highest for blacks, followed by whites, Hispanics, and Asian/Pacific Islander (APIs). After adjustment, the MR for blacks became comparable to whites (mortality rate ratio (MRR)=1.02). The low-Hispanic MR did not change; the Hispanic advantage persisted (MRR=0.66), as did the API advantage (MRR=0.50).

Higher education may not substantially change the MR for Hispanics, and it may only account for a portion of the survival advantage among APIs. The findings also suggest that without reducing the disparity in higher education attainment between blacks and whites, equality in other socioeconomic factors may not abolish the disparity in mortality between these groups.

This study bypassed common limitations of ethnic mortality studies, with intrinsic parity for certain socio-economic status factors (full-time employment and health care access) across cohort members and consistent ethnic classification across time-points. This includes a cohort of API workers with complete self-identification of ethnicity, which has not been accomplished by previous investigations.

Using the data from a unique sample of Mexican-American adults from the U.S.-Mexico border area, this chapter offers explanations for Mexican-American obesity, with the special focus on immigrant generation status, income, and gender. On a theoretical plane, this study attempts to apply the nutrition transition theory to the study of immigrant assimilation in a regional context. Considered are the most important structural dimensions of immigrant assimilation – country of birth (the United States vs. Mexico) and age of arrival. Of the two aforementioned factors, age of arrival is found to be a stronger predictor of obesity that country of birth. As Mexican-American immigrants’ length of residence increases, so does their Body Mass Index (BMI) that reflects the adoption of less diverse diet and sedentary lifestyles. Through the use of multilevel hierarchical modeling, I also found sizeable variation in obesity by income, gender, and family history of obesity. The analyses suggest that the interventions aimed at reducing overweight and obesity among Mexican-Americans in the U.S.-Mexico border region should be better targeted by focusing on women and low-income households.

This chapter provides both an introduction to the volume and a review of literature on health disparities and social determinants.

Literature Review.

The chapter argues for the importance of greater consideration of social determinants of health disparities. This includes a consideration of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status factors, geographic and place factors, and disparities especially linked to particular diseases.

Reviews the topic of health disparities and social determinants and previews this book.

This chapter provides an introduction to the volume along with a brief review of literature on gender, women’s health concerns, and other social factors in health and health care services.

Literature review.

The chapter argues for the importance of greater examination of gender, women’s health concerns, and social factors in health and health care services.

Reviews the issues of gender, women, and social factors and previews this book.

This chapter provides both an introduction to the volume and a brief review of literature on women, gender, and health and health-care services as well as racial/ethnic minorities in the same areas.

The chapter argues for the importance of greater examination of women, issues of gender, and racial and ethnic minorities in health and health-care services.

The chapter reviews the issues of women and racial and ethnic minorities and previews this book.

This chapter will initially review some health care system issues with a focus on the US health care system. It will then review some of the sociological literature about race/ethnicity, immigration, socioeconomic status (SES) and gender and how these factors link to health and health care. In addition, the chapter will serve as an introduction to the volume and will briefly review the contents of the other sections and chapters in this volume.

Social and economic disparities between racial/ethnic groups are a feature of the American context into which immigrants are incorporated and a key determinant of population health. We ask whether racial/ethnic disparities in diabetes vary by nativity and whether native-immigrant disparities in diabetes vary by race and over time in the United States. Using the 2000–2015 National Health Interview Survey, we estimate logistic regressions to examine the interaction of race/ethnicity, nativity, and duration in the US in shaping diabetes patterns. Relative to their native-born co-ethnics, foreign-born Asian adults experience a significant diabetes disadvantage, while foreign-born Hispanic, Black, and White adults experience a significant advantage. Adjusting for obesity, education, and other covariates eliminates the foreign-born advantage for Black and White adults, but it persists for Hispanic adults. The same adjustment accentuates the disadvantage for foreign-born Asian adults. For Black and Hispanic adults, the protective foreign-born effect erodes as duration in the US increases. For foreign-born Asian adults, the immigrant disadvantage appears to grow with duration in the US. Relative to native-born White adults, all non-white groups regardless of nativity see a diabetes disadvantage because the racial/ethnic disadvantage either countervails a foreign-born advantage or amplifies a foreign-born disadvantage. Racial/ethnic differentials in diabetes are considerable and are influenced by each group’s nativity composition. Obesity and (for the foreign-born) time in the US influence these disparities, but do not explain them. These findings underscore the importance of unmeasured, systemic determinants of health in America’s race-conscious society.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate children's vulnerability to asthma and its relationship with marginalized locations. More specifically, the effects of zip code level social predictors on children's asthma and their conditionality on location in the Texas‐Mexico border region are explored. The border region is perhaps the most marginalized in the USA.

Data for analysis comes from the State of Texas and the US Bureau of the Census. Negative binomial regression models are used to predict asthma hospitalizations using a set of social predictors. Then, interaction effects are used to test if social predictors are conditional on border location.

Within the state of Texas, location in a metropolitan area, location along the US‐Mexico border, percent Hispanic, percent African American and percent Native American are positive and significant predictors of asthma hospitalizations; social class is negative and significant. The effects of proportion of Hispanics who were foreign born, median year of home construction, and percent of homes with inadequate heating are conditional on a zip code's location relative to the US‐Mexico border, with the slopes being steeper in border locations. Findings in general suggest that locational and social factors intersect in marginalized places (i.e. border regions of Texas) to create vulnerability to asthma hospitalizations.

This study is conducted solely in the USA.

As sociologists continue to consider space as a factor in health inequalities, this paper demonstrates the utility of considering space as operating at more than one scale.

This chapter proposes that efforts to improve our understanding of factors affecting migrant health and longevity in the United States must consider migrants’ labor market incorporation and the structural conditions under which they work. I use public-use death certificate data to examine whether there is a mortality penalty for foreign-born workers in the secondary sector industries of agriculture and construction. I focus on the decade of the 1990s for two contextual and empirical reasons: (1) the decade was characterized by economic restructuring, restrictive immigration policy, increased migration, and dispersion of migrants to new geographic destinations; and (2) the 1990s is an opportunistic decade because 19 states coded the industry and occupation of the decedent during this time. These numerator mortality data and Census denominator data are used to compare all-cause mortality rates between working-age (16–64 years) US-born and foreign-born agricultural and construction workers, the overall foreign-born population, and foreign-born workers in health care – an industry where the foreign-born tend to work in well-paid occupations that are well-regulated by the state. The results show a clear mortality penalty for foreign-born workers in agriculture and construction compared to the overall foreign-born population and foreign-born healthcare workers. The results also show the mortality penalty for foreign-born secondary sector workers varies by industry. These findings support the argument that bringing work into our analyses is critical to understanding the contextual and structural factors affecting migrant health and survival.