Disaggregation of Latina/o Child and Adult Health Data: A Systematic Review of Public Health Surveillance Surveys in the United States

Public health surveillance surveys provide key data from which the U.S. population health estimates are derived. We conducted a systematic review of the contemporary scientific literature on prevalent Latina/o child and adult health outcomes to determine the proportion of peer-reviewed articles derived from national or state U.S. public health surveillance surveys that disaggregated or stratified Latina/o population health estimates by social determinants and, therefore, provided within-Latino group comparisons. We searched biomedical electronic databases (Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, JSTOR, Sociological Abstracts) for observational U.S. studies published between January 2006 and June 2016 and identified 573 full-text articles on Latina/o health. Of those, 175 articles further disaggregated the data along five categories of social determinants: sociodemographics (61.0%), socioeconomic status (18.5%), migration factors (11.7%), place-based factors (8.1%), and individual/interpersonal factors (1.9%). Three-fourths of the articles (77.7%) focused on adults, and the remaining focused on children (22.9%). The number of mean articles published per year was 15.9, with some slight variation over the 10-year period. While equivocal, the seemingly low percentage may stem from limitations in research design and data collection, as well as the lack of clear guidelines or a standardized set of survey items that reflect disaggregation categories most relevant to the Latina/o community. Our results suggest the need for programmatic initiatives to promote and standardize Latina/o health data disaggregation across the lifecourse and across the research process from design, data collection, and analysis, to reporting and publication. PROSPERO2016:CRD42016041879.