ArticleSocial science & medicine (1982)2026
Measuring the spatial scale of structural racism and discrimination: Consequences for estimated life expectancy.
Article in Social science & medicine (1982), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Systems-Level Interventions to Disrupt Structural Racism and Improve Black Adolescent Health Outcomes: A Scoping Review.Societies (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesUnderstanding the role of structural racism and discrimination is crucial for understanding persistent social disparities across many domains, but a key concern remains: how does it operate at different spatial scales, and does that affect how it should be measured? We explore both empirical and theoretical differences between structural racism measures at meso and macro scales in the United States. We construct two different measures of structural racism at the meso-level (that is, neighborhoods), one capturing absolute measures of neighborhood blight, the other relative indicators of Black-White inequality. We test four different scales of these meso-level measures, each defined by a buffer centered on a block with four different radii. We simultaneously measure relative racial inequality at the macro level (that is, the county).
methodsWe compared the relationship between structural racism measures on life expectancy at varying meso-scales. The structural racism measures include traditional indicators like residential segregation, as well as novel ones capturing neighborhood blight, such as eviction rates, housing vacancies, home loan denials, and proximity to toxic waste, fringe banks, liquor stores, and bars. We estimate multilevel linear models in which the outcome measure was the average life expectancy at the meso-level.
resultsWe found consistent evidence that neighborhood- and county-level structural racism are associated with lower average life expectancy in neighborhoods. For our combined neighborhood structural racism measure (Black/White inequality and neighborhood blight), we detected a nonlinear relationship in which life expectancy is even more sharply lower for higher concentrations of multidimensional structural racism. The novel neighborhood blight measure had stronger relationships with life expectancy than did Black/White inequality, and they were stronger in high concentration Black neighborhoods.
conclusionsUnderstanding how structural racism operates at different spatial scales is important for exploring its mechanisms and informing targeted multilevel interventions to address health disparities.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.