Primary Submission Category: Place/Communities
Ranking Communities of Mississippi for Health Burdens: A Census Tract-Based Perspective of Social Determinants of Health
Authors: Tasnim Tabassum, Salit Chakma, Benjamin Walker, Fazlay Faruque,
Presenting Author: Tasnim Tabassum*
Community assessment of health disparities requires examination of social determinants of health (SDOH) at granular levels to inform effective policy interventions. The National Institute of Health (NIH) has Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) programs to investigate the root causes of health problems and chronic diseases in American communities. They suggest a list of SDOHs that are essential for analyzing health burdens and disparities. Our study investigated 20 indicators across the NIH’s 14 SDOH domains within Mississippi’s 878 census tracts. Based on these indicators, we established simple composite scores for all the census tracts of Mississippi. Our two-stage methodology involved statistical and spatial analysis. First, we used secondary data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) five-year estimates. Data processing is conducted in STATA 17, which includes cleaning, standardization, composite score calculation, and demographic analysis. Census tracts were classified into quartile-based performance groups, and scores were summed to rank tracts from best to worst performing. In the second stage, spatial analysis using ArcGIS Pro explored health disparities. Findings revealed that Mississippi Delta along with other census tracts had the worst SDOH conditions. Their socio-economic status, housing characteristics, living arrangements, lack of resources, transportation, etc. are increasing the burden. The spatial analysis enables us to observe the pattern and connect with demographic properties. The elderly females living alone had a 7% higher likelihood of residing in the most vulnerable tracts. We conducted a regression analysis to find the association between cardiovascular disease health outcomes and established census tract performance to identify where policy-level focus should be implemented for reduced health disparities.