Social Science & MedicineThis week in journal club we return to our discussion of social inequalities in health with a new paper by Nancy Krieger and colleagues:

Krieger, N., Chen, J. T., Waterman, P. D., Hartman, C., Stoddard, A. M., Quinn, M. et al. (2008). The inverse hazard law: Blood pressure, sexual harassment, racial discrimination, workplace abuse and occupational exposures in US low-income black, white and Latino workers. Social Science & Medicine, 67(12), 1970-1981.

This article proposes what Krieger et al. refer to as the inverse hazard law: “The accumulation of health hazards tends to vary inversely with the power and resources of the populations affected.” It picks up on several themes we’ve discussed before, including (a) health consequences of structural inequalities, (b) measurement of individual-level exposure to discrimination, (c) pathways linking discrimination and health. Other key topics to consider for our discussion on Friday include the concepts of occupational and social hazards and whether there is a role for culture in the model Krieger et al. propose in their Fig. 1.

See you on Friday at 11:45 a.m. in the Department Conference Room (1208 Turlington).