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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access published online on March 15, 2008
American Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/aje/kwn015
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American Journal of Epidemiology © The Author 2008. Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Harper et al. Respond to "Measuring Social Disparities in Health"

Sam Harper1, John Lynch1, Stephen C. Meersman2, Nancy Breen2, William W. Davis2 and Marsha E. Reichman2

1 Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2 Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD

Correspondence to Dr. Sam Harper, Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, McGill University, 1020 Pine Avenue West, Room 17B, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1A2, Canada (e-mail: sam.harper@mcgill.ca).

Received for publication January 9, 2008. Accepted for publication January 15, 2008.

Abbreviations: CHD, coronary heart disease

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.


   INTRODUCTION
 
We appreciate Messer's thoughtful comments (1) on our article (2) and, broadly speaking, we agree that health disparities research and policymaking would benefit from increased attention to the issues of scale, interpretability, and causal relations in the measurement of health disparities.


   ABSOLUTE MEASURES
 
Like Messer (1), we have suggested using measures of absolute disparity, at least as a starting point for discussions of the size of health disparities, because they quantify the absolute burden of disease among disadvantaged populations and the potential gains to overall population health from reducing absolute disparities (3, 4). However, by way of clarification, her argument that absolute measures are preferable because . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   IMPROVING INTERPRETABILITY: APPROACHES FROM THE RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION LITERATURE
 

   CAUSAL MODELS
 

   CONCLUDING REMARKS
 

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