American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access published online on March 15, 2008
American Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/aje/kwn019
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Invited Commentary: Measuring Social Disparities in Health—What Was the Question Again?
From the Human Studies Division, National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, US Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, NC
Correspondence to Dr. Lynne C. Messer, MD 58A, Human Studies Division, National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, US Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, NC 27711 (e-mail: messer.lynne{at}epa.gov).
Received for publication November 29, 2007. Accepted for publication December 3, 2007.
Monitoring social disparities in health is not a straightforward project. Defining what constitutes a disparity is challenging, and multiple measures have been proposed to track changes in disparity over time. In this issue, Harper et al. (Am J Epidemiol 2008;167:000–00) present seven health disparity measures and apply them to US lung cancer incidence rates (1992–2004). They find that different summary measures provide different answers to the question "Has disparity increased or decreased?" Their findings leave us uncertain how to use and interpret these measures to track changes in social disparities in health. In this invited commentary, the author proposes that increased attention to the scale at which disparities are measured, the interpretations attached to the various measures used, and the way in which these measures are assembled on the basis of conceptual models would benefit the field. Specifically, attention to these three areas would increase the capacity to communicate research findings to the public and policy-making consumers of disparity-related research.
epidemiologic methods; ethnic groups; health status disparities; lung neoplasms; socioeconomic factors
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  R. S. Bhopal RE: "AN OVERVIEW OF METHODS FOR MONITORING SOCIAL DISPARITIES IN CANCER WITH AN EXAMPLE USING TRENDS IN LUNG CANCER INCIDENCE BY AREA-SOCIOECONOMIC POSITION AND RACE-ETHNICITY, 1992-2004" Am. J. Epidemiol., November 15, 2008; 168(10): 1214 - 1216. [Full Text] [PDF]
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S. Harper, J. Lynch, S. C. Meersman, N. Breen, W. W. Davis, and M. E. Reichman Harper et al. Respond to "Measuring Social Disparities in Health" Am. J. Epidemiol., April 15, 2008; 167(8): 905 - 907. [Full Text] [PDF]
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