Effects of Racial & Economic Segregation on Health

描述（由申请人提供）：消除健康差距是2010年健康人的总体目标之一。然而，对社会经济地位和不同的健康行为概况的个人层面差异的关注未能充分说明在少数群体中观察到的健康缺陷。这种无法解释的差距的持续存在，使许多人将注意力转向居住生活环境的差异，认为这是种族/民族健康差异的一个因素。使用生命历程的方法，考虑个人的社会经济历史，我们研究的因果关系的影响，城市组织-侧重于种族隔离模式-对成人健康和死亡率。然后，我们估计在何种程度上隔离有助于种族/族裔群体之间的健康差异。倾向评分加权用于解释观察到的异质性，并减轻由于模型错误指定导致的偏倚。进行敏感性分析以评估省略的混杂变量对显著分离结果估计值的潜在影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Eliminating health disparities is one of the overarching goals of Healthy People 2010. However, the focus on individual-level differences in socio-economic status and divergent health-behavior profiles have failed to fully account for the health deficits observed in minority groups. The persistency of this unexplained gap has led many to direct their attention towards differences in residential living circumstances as a contributor to racial/ethnic health disparities . Using a life-course approach that considers the socioeconomic history of an individual, we examine the causal effects of urban organization - focusing on racial segregation patterns - on adult health and mortality. We then estimate to what extent segregation contributes to health disparities among race/ethnic groups. Propensity score weighting is used to account for observed heterogeneity and to mitigate the bias due to model misspecification. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to assess the potential effect of an omitted confounding variable on estimates of significant segregation findings.