Abstract
Residents of distressed urban areas suffer early aging-related disease and excess mortality. Using a community-based participatory research approach in a collaboration between social researchers and cellular biologists, we collected a unique data set of 239 black, white, or Mexican adults from a stratified, multistage probability sample of three Detroit neighborhoods. We drew venous blood and measured telomere length (TL), an indicator of stress-mediated biological aging, linking respondents’ TL to their community survey responses. We regressed TL on socioeconomic, psychosocial, neighborhood, and behavioral stressors, hypothesizing and finding an interaction between poverty and racial-ethnic group. Poor whites had shorter TL than nonpoor whites; poor and nonpoor blacks had equivalent TL; and poor Mexicans had longer TL than nonpoor Mexicans. Findings suggest unobserved heterogeneity bias is an important threat to the validity of estimates of TL differences by race-ethnicity. They point to health impacts of social identity as contingent, the products of structurally rooted biopsychosocial processes.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 199-224 |
Number of pages | 26 |
Journal | Journal of Health and Social Behavior |
Volume | 56 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 4 2015 |
Keywords
- Latinos
- aging
- blacks
- health disparities
- neighborhood
- poverty
- stressors
- telomeres
- urban
- whites