Both papers for the week focused on the residential segregation, race/ethnicity, and health outcomes. I liked the contrast between the two, with the Jones paper looking at air pollution exposure and the Krieger paper looking at fatal and non-fatal assaults. I found myself reading the papers, and thinking “unfortunately this makes sense” that the poorer conditions and outcomes would tend be worse in areas with higher segregation (though it seems like there are potentially some exceptions), among and those in non-white groups.
It was interesting to see the methods the researchers used for their analyses in regard to spatial variables and definitions. For the Jones paper, I kept thinking (because my head is always in maternal health) if similar methods could be used to then look at maternal and newborn health overlaid with the segregation and pollution information. There have been several studies that have looked at air pollution and preterm birth, including a really interesting paper by Rakesh Ghosh (link to a news article about it here), and it would be interesting to see if it’s related to other MNCH and segregation/social factors (including racialized economic segregation). Of course there would probably be issues with confounding, but it would be interesting to see nonetheless, including measures of distance to health facilities.
For both papers, it would be interesting to see these analyses applied to more metropolitan areas that are highly segregated, like Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, and Oakland. While this has very little to do with the analysis itself, I was struck by the information in the discussion of the Krieger paper, where they talk about how much evidence there is now for the effect of racial segregation and racialized economic segregation, and yet the Epidemiologic Reviews on understanding gun violence didn’t mention these measures. Perhaps the Krieger and Co could write an updated review of measures for gun violence, since their discussion section was really compelling on the topic. It seems like the reviews volume they mentioned had at least somewhat of a global approach, so perhaps that’s why it was overlooked, but I would imagine that segregation in all/most countries of the world would be of interest.