Health and Social Inequality
Title
Health and Social Inequality
Author
Pescosolido, Bernice A.
Research Area
The Individual and Society
Topic
Health and Illness
Abstract
The link between social cleavages and life chances has been a mainstay of sociology, social science, and public health's contribution to understanding well‐being, morbidity, and mortality. From early classic work to the most recent studies, inequality has been associated with the incidence and prevalence of disease, access to health care, and higher‐than‐expected death rates, even for infants. Importantly, these differences have been documented for individuals, for neighborhoods, and for nations. On all of these key indicators, there is a clear gradient, whether measured by socioeconomic status (SES), education, or even social networks. Recent work has restated and expanded the impact of inequality through the Theory of Fundamental Causes and a focus on “health disparities.” The latter targets group membership by race, ethnicity, and/or gender, to name a few social characteristics. However, challenges arise from pushing our understandings of the role of inequalities further as status configurations, for example, only proxy the social interactions, social conditions, and social experiences that produce inequality. New theoretical and empirical research also suggests that incorporating biology into our understanding of how social inequality translates into poor health, unequal treatment, and premature death can be done by synthesizing new visions of sociocultural embeddedness with biological embedding into a complex systems framework for health and health care research. This integration dismisses the “old silos” and calls for increased collaborations across the sociomedical sciences, medicine, and genetics.