Primary Submission Category: Methodological approaches to studying public health
Identifying High-Priority Ecological Indicators of Structural Racism in Black and Hispanic/Latino Communities
Authors: Alisha Crump, Ester Villalonga-Olives,
Presenting Author: Alisha Crump*
Aim
Structural racism manifests as a multifaceted phenomenon in which various indicators carry different levels of significance and impact. This study aimed to utilize a theory-driven approach to identify high-priority key ecological-level indicators of structural racism to inform the development of a novel, multilevel, and multidimensional structural racism measure for Black and Hispanic/Latino communities.
Methods
The content development team, consisting of four social epidemiologists, pre-selected 68 ecological indicators from previous literature. They used the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities framework to guide their selection. A panel of experts, including five health inequality specialists, three community members, two economic inequality experts, and two psychometricians participated in a three-phase modified Delphi approach. During the process, they discussed the indicators, proposed new ones, and ranked them in the final round. The ranking used a scale from 1 (extremely relevant) to 5 (not at all relevant). The average relevance score for each indicator was visualized using Python Matplotlib and Seaborn for data visualization.
Results
We identified 71 ecological-level indicators. Overall, economic-related indicators generally received lower numerical values than environmental factors, suggesting that financial stability measures are priority metrics for measuring structural racism among Black and Hispanic/ Latino communities.
Conclusion
This study provides empirical evidence for prioritizing of specific ecological-level indicators when creating measures of structural racism among Black and Hispanic/Latino communities. Next steps involve leveraging the expert panel’s relevance rankings to create a weighted scoring system for the structural racism ecological-level index and combine it with individual-level data to create the multilevel measure.