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Primary Submission Category: Place/Communities
Is Racial and Economic Segregation associated with Racialized Health Inequalities across Canadian Cities?
Authors: Alexis Dennis, Trent Lebans,
Presenting Author: Alexis Dennis*
A robust body of research from the United States shows that residential segregation is a fundamental cause of health inequality because it shapes access to health protective socioeconomic resources, exposure to health-related environmental risks, and engagement in health behaviors. There is evidence that Canadian cities also experience moderate levels of racial and socioeconomic segregation, but to our knowledge, no study has investigated whether residential segregation in Canada is associated with patterns of racial health inequality. To address this gap, we used data from the 2016 Canadian Census to construct racial and economic Index of Dissimilarity (DI) measures for 21 Canadian cities. The DI measures were merged with population survey data from Wave 3 of the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (collected in 2016, n=9,050). Ordered logistic regression models were used to estimate associations between patterns of racial and economic residential segregation and disparities in self-rated health for Black, Chinese, Filipino/Southeast Asian, Latin American, Arab/West Asian, Japanese/Korean, and Aboriginal visible minority groups. Our preliminary findings show that after adjusting for sociodemographic and spatial characteristics, Chinese and Black Canadian populations are both sensitive to high levels of economic segregation, but in disparate ways. High economic segregation may be health protective for Chinese Canadians, buffering an initial health disadvantage in comparison to White Canadians. It, however, may be detrimental to the health of Black Canadians, eroding an initial health advantage in comparison to White Canadians. Additionally, increases in racial residential segregation were modestly associated with worse self-rated health among Aboriginal, in comparison to White, Canadians. The next step in this analysis is to run a series of robustness checks. Our findings advance the small but growing Canadian literature on racialized health disparities.