Two Mechanisms: The Role of Social Capital and Industrial Pollution Exposure in Explaining Racial Disparities in Self-Rated Health

Abstract

This study provides an empirical test of two mechanisms (social capital and exposure to air pollution) that are theorized to mediate the effect of neighborhood on health and contribute to racial disparities in health outcomes. To this end, we utilize the Social Capital Benchmark Study, a national survey of individuals nested within communities in the United States, to estimate how multiple dimensions of social capital and exposure to air pollution, explain racial disparities in self-rated health. Our main findings show that when controlling for individual-confounders, and nesting within communities, our indicator of cognitive bridging, generalized trust, decreases the gap in self-rated health between African Americans and Whites by 84%, and the gap between Hispanics and Whites by 54%. Our other indicator of cognitive social capital, cognitive linking as represented by engagement in politics, decreases the gap in health between Hispanics and Whites by 32%, but has little impact on African Americans. We also assessed whether the gap in health was explained by respondents’ estimated exposure to toxicity-weighted air pollutants from large industrial facilities over the previous year. Our results show that accounting for exposure to these toxins has no effect on the racial gap in self-rated health in these data. This paper contributes to the neighborhood effects literature by examining the impact that estimated annual industrial air pollution, and multiple measures of social capital, have on explaining the racial gap in health in a sample of individuals nested within communities across the United States.

Are Socioeconomic Inequalities in Physical Health Mediated by Embodied Environmental Toxins?

“…Although this study contributes to previous work by bridging the fields of social epidemiology and environmental inequality and by formally testing established theoretical models, the veracity of our results is contingent on replication with longitudinal data and more comprehensive assessments of socioeconomic status. Additional research is also needed to explore socioeconomic variations in toxin exposure and physical health in different national contexts and at different levels of analysis (Ard 2015(Ard , 2016Ard et al 2016). Research along these lines would advance our collective understanding of the environmental processes linking socioeconomic status and health.…”

Environmental Justice Research: Contemporary Issues and Emerging Topics

“…Based on this materialist foundation, less emphasis in EJ research has been placed on people’s subjectivities. Several articles in this Special Issue advance EJ research by examining and clarifying stakeholder subjectivities regarding EJ issues [9,11,18,19], which extends the research framework beyond the documentation of unjust conditions and processes. In Hornik et al’s [9] study, which clarifies community group perceptions of EJ in the context of water sustainability initiatives in Milwaukee, WI, USA, stakeholders shared similar perspectives on environmental injustice as an everyday experience.…”

“…Findings highlight the importance of media in shaping perceptions of environmental injustice, and reveal how public perceptions of injustice may be cultivated to impede societal transitions toward renewable energy sources. Ard et al [19] use multilevel models in a US national study of the roles of neighborhood social capital and exposure to industrial air pollution in explaining the racial gap in self-rated health between black, Hispanic, and white individuals. They found that individuals’ feelings of trust in neighbors of different social standing and perceptions of political empowerment largely accounted for lower self-rated health among African Americans (and partially accounted for it among Hispanics) relative to whites, while exposure to industrial air pollution was statistically irrelevant.…”

Social Mechanisms in Epidemiological Publications on Small-Area Health Inequalities—A Scoping Review

“…Basic information about these studies are provided in Table 1. Most studies (four) were from the UK (21,23,25,28), followed by the USA (17,24,29). Two studies were from Australia (26,27), two from Belgium (20,22) and two from the Netherlands (30,31).…”

“…(23), respondents rated their neighborhood on a scale from dangerous to safe (26), no information about measurement (30), two questions about neighborhood as a safe place to walk around at night and if people feel safe in their homes (27) General social trust [(26), (19)*] Question: if "most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?" (19), trust of people in Australia, government, and big business (26) Neighborhood trust [(17)*, (24)*, (27)] Index about generalized trust through different entities in the neighborhood (17,27), question: how much "people in the neighborhood can be trusted" (24) Group involvement [(17)*, (26), (27), (20), (22)*, (19),…”