The burden of carcinogenic air toxics among Asian Americans in four US metro areas

Abstract

This study investigated disparities in residential exposure to carcinogenic air pollutants among Asian Americans, including Asian ancestry subgroups, in four US metro areas with high proportions of Asians, i.e., Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle. Generalized estimating equations adjusting for socioeconomic status, population density and clustering show that a greater proportion of Asian Americans in census tracts was associated with significantly greater health risk in all four metro areas. Intracategorical disparities were uncovered for Asian ancestry. A greater proportion Korean was positively associated with risk in four metro areas; greater proportion Chinese and Filipino were positively associated with risk in three of the four metro areas. While Asian Americans are infrequently examined in environmental justice research, these results demonstrate that Asian Americans experience substantial distributional environmental injustices in these four metro areas and that ancestry is an important dimension of intracategorical complexity.

Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Household Food Insecurity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: a Nationally Representative Study

“…GEEs are appropriate for this study for two main reasons: first, like other generalized linear models, GEEs relax the assumptions of traditional regression models, such as normality of variable distribution [ 44 – 46 ]; second, GEEs are better than other generalized linear models when used to analyze clustered data [ 47 ], and our data has a clustered structure: the 74,413 households in our sample were clustered within the 50 states and the District of Columbia. GEEs have also been used to analyze clustered data in other studies [ 48 – 50 ].…”

“…In terms of the intracluster dependency correlation matrix of GEEs, in this study, we specified the exchangeable correlation matrix, which assumes constant intracluster dependency, such that all off-diagonal elements of the correlation matrix are equal [45,46]. We used this specification in other studies (e.g., 49,50,52), and it fits better than other applicable specifications (i.e., independent and unstructured) for the six GEE models.…”

Distributional Environmental Injustices for a Minority Group without Minority Status: Arab Americans and Residential Exposure to Carcinogenic Air Pollution in the US

“…Similar evidence has mounted in the decades since [9][10][11][12][13][14]. Alongside research documenting inequalities for Black and Hispanic Americans, recent investigations have highlighted risks for Asian Americans [4,[15][16][17].…”

“…and is assumed to be compound symmetric [17]. The continuous variables were standardized before entry into the models.…”

“…The 2010 Census also provided data that is relevant to measuring ethnic origin and ancestry, but not for Black, White, or "other race" Americans. These data have been used in EJ studies on Asian Americans [15,17], but are not available for Arab Americans.…”