HPM Seminar Series
Structural racism is a multidimensional system driving inequities in various sectors. Significant progress has been made in operationalizing and measuring structural racism. Still, one debate remains active: how do we study the health-harming effects of multiple highly correlated dimensions of structural racism together as a system? Recently, cross-disciplinary experts have proposed using a latent-construct approach to address this issue. Rather than decomposing the independent and reinforcing effects of the structural racism dimensions in regressions and using interaction terms to bring these effects back together, this method derives a multidimensional measure that encapsulates both independent and reinforcing effects. This seminar will discuss our recent project that uses this new approach to examine the linkage between multidimensional structural racism typologies we identified in Minnesota and the risks of preterm birth, low birth weight, and small for gestational age for infants of White, US-born Black, and foreign-born Black Minnesotans.
