It is a presentation about survey results of young (age 18-24) LBQ (self-identified, or WSW) women recruited on Facebook with a $25 gift card incentive. 76% smoked, and 77% of smokers smoked more than 5 cigarettes daily. This is very high, even in comparison to young women in general.
Various factors like self-perception as member of LGBT community, LGBT organization membership, LGBT social participation, peer support, friends of same identity, and time spent with other SSA women were noted in terms of correlation with smoking status, frequency, and amount.
For those who are trying to argue that the problem is poverty not race, and those who missed the overall point made by the researchers in this article (that the increase in black mortality here correlates with racISM not race – read carefully the last two sentences in the part quoted by the OP, particularly the last one: “DMAs characterized by a one standard deviation greater level of area racism were associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause Black mortality rate, equivalent to over 30,000 deaths annually. The magnitude of this effect was attenuated to 5.7% after adjustment for DMA-level demographic and Black socioeconomic covariates”.
In other words, they DID correct for socioeconomic factors. (And spending just one more minute of reading time to finish just the abstract shows that they attempted to correct for many other factors as well(“A model controlling for the White mortality rate was used to further adjust for unmeasured confounders that influence mortality overall in a geographic area, and to examine Black-White disparities in the mortality rate. Area racism remained significantly associated with the all-cause Black mortality rate”) in an attempt to isolate the effect of RACISM.
Presumably most of you here graduated from college, and many frequently mention that they graduated from a"top 20" college, blahblahblah. The research in this paper was funded by the NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. OF COURSE these researchers knew to correct for basic, basic factors such as socioeconomic status, plus as many other factors as possible. This is “Research 101” stuff (or “Research for Dummies”). And basic SAT-level reading comprehension reveals that the paper is not just about race-related mortality, but the hypothesis that race-related mortality differences are exacerbated in areas that display more racISM.
MomCat, to be fair- I have read many, many papers by “top” researchers at “top” universities who don’t take even basic factors into account. There are whole classes on what not to do in research that use papers published in the last 5 years to model what not to do.
(I admitted I didn’t read the article and wasn’t commenting on it.)
Wow, that’s really pathetic, romani. Published in REAL, peer-reviewed journals?! Socioeconomic status is so basic. I’d hope the NIH or REJohnson Fdn would cut off funding to such crappy research in a New York Minute.
Still, not talking to you, but one only had to read the OP to see that these researchers did correct for SES. Sigh.
To what extent is/was it a reading comprehension problem vs a denial-of-racism problem?
Yes, and I agree that it is absolutely pathetic. Even in fields where people should “know better” (I’m looking atchu, public health), it seems to be a basic concept that people just miss.
I am curious about the article. I will read it in the near future and actually comment on it. Just too hard to read papers on my phone!
I figured you weren’t talking to me, but I just wanted to throw that out there.
For what it’s worth, my thoughts on the why it happens (not in reference to this paper, but to why SES is so rarely stratified for) is that in too many fields, “Black” and “Hispanic” have become synonymous with “poor”- whether intentionally or not. IME, Sociology actually does a pretty good job of separating out the two but not too many other fields that I read widely in.
Yes, in sociology we always did note socioeconomic class and that was an important variable to always be considered. Have found public health articles to be less rigorous about this as well.
“Area racism was the proportion of Google searches containing the “N-word” in 196 designated market areas (DMAs).”
This is from the abstract. I admit that I did not read the article, but I am really surprised that this is what the authors are using as the measure of racism.
Question to folks who read the article - can you please describe how the autors describe their choice of this parameter as the measure of racism and what was done to establish it as a valid measure of racism? I’m curious, because using a single parameter like this is too simplistic, IMO. It only tells you that high percent of google searches for N word (disgusting!) correlates with…
BTW, bad research is being published left and right. Need not go any further than Retraction Watch to see what kind of misconduct happens in research.
The third through sixth paragraphs of the introduction of the paper describe their reasoning. Basically, they state that other ways to measure racism are clouded by other things, and the fact that racism is socially unacceptable means that few people will volunteer racist viewpoints in a non-anonymous way. Since web searches are more anonymous than other kinds of surveys (so racists may reveal themselves in web searches more than in other surveys), and web searches for racial insults against black people have been found to correlate well to state by state relative vote differences between Obama 2008 and Kerry 2004, they may be a way to measure racism from the source (i.e. the racists) rather than the target (the people who are on the receiving end of suspected racial discrimination), according to the authors.
Thanks! Kind of hard to read the paper on my phone.
I was just wondering… How does the number of google searches with the N word relate to mistreatment and discrimination of Hispanics? Jewish people (see the recent thread where it was argues that it is also racism)? Native Americans? Asians? Is racism always black and white? What about places where the Internet use is not very widespread? What about the older folks who may be very racist by way of their upbringing yet are not computer savvy? What about black kids searching for a popular rap album about bleep bleep? Are these searches excluded because they are irrelevant? Can we even come with a single parameter measure of such complex issue?
