Documented disparities exist in the United States between the majority white population and various racial and ethnic minority populations on several health and health care indicators, including access to and quality of care, disease prevalence, infant mortality, and life expectancy. However, awareness of these disparities-a necessary first step toward changing behavior and compelling action-remains limited. Our survey of 3,159 adults age eighteen or older found that 59 percent of Americans in 2010 were aware of racial and ethnic disparities that disproportionately affect African Americans and Hispanics or Latinos. That number represents a modest increase over the 55 percent recorded in a 1999 survey. Meanwhile, in our survey, 89 percent of African American respondents were aware of African American and white disparities, versus 55 percent of whites. Yet the survey also revealed low levels of awareness among racial and ethnic minority groups about disparities that disproportionately affect their own communities. For example, only 54 percent of African Americans were aware of disparities in the rate of HIV/AIDS between African Americans and whites, and only 21 percent of Hispanics or Latinos were aware of those disparities between their group and whites. Policy makers must increase the availability and quality of data on racial and ethnic health disparities and create multisectoral partnerships to develop targeted educational campaigns to increase awareness of health disparities.

To increase understanding of what Americans think about personal and public health, a national survey of US adults was conducted in 2015-16 to develop a typology of values and beliefs. The survey was commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for its Culture of Health initiative. Six specific population groupings, or segments, were identified. Three segments included people who supported an active government role in health, two segments were characterized by people who were skeptical toward government, and one segment was characterized by people with conflicted attitudes toward government in health. One of the segments, labeled "supportive," included people who had broad concerns about equity and social solidarity and believed in health disparities and the importance of the social determinants of health. People in two of the other segments that supported an active government role in health shared some of these concerns. There is clearly the potential to mobilize all three of these segments in efforts to improve population health and health equity in the United States. For people whose beliefs put them in the more skeptical segments, a focus on building healthier communities at the local level may garner significant support as long as there is private-sector leadership for the effort.

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The theory of compensatory consumption suggests that a possible lack of traditional avenues for fulfilling needs for social status may lead ethnic minorities to shift measures of social status from traditional indicators such as occupational prestige to consumption indicators of status conveying goods. In this study we investigate whether a household’s ethnic identity affects its budget allocation to status conveying goods. Annual budget shares for apparel, housing, and home furnishings are used for measuring status consumption. Results show that Asian American households allocate more of their budget to housing, while African American more to apparel, compared to European households. Hispanic households allocate more of their budget to both apparel and housing than European American households, but to a lesser degree compared to Asian Americans to housing and African Americans to apparel. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006Ethnicity, Compensatory consumption, Status consumption, Budget allocation,

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