Sociological contributions to race and health: Diversifying the ontological and methodological agenda

Abstract

Sociologists have made fundamental contributions to the study of race and health in the United States. They have disrupted biological assumptions of race, uncovered individual and structural factors that drive racial health disparities and explored the effects of racism on health. In recent years, however, with broader shifts towards big data, the work to understand the dynamics between race and health has been increasingly pursued from a quantitative perspective. Often, such analyses isolate intermediary mechanisms to further explain race as a cause of disease. While important, these approaches potentially limit our investigations of underlying assumptions about race and the complexity of this critical social construct. We argue that the resulting dearth of qualitative research on race and health substantially limits the knowledge being produced. After providing an overview of the overwhelming shift towards quantitative methods in the study of race and health, we present three areas of study that would benefit from greater qualitative inquiry as follows: (1) Healthy Immigrant Effect, (2) Maternal Health and (3) End‐of‐Life Care. We conclude with a call to the discipline to embrace the critical role of qualitative research in exploring the dynamics of race and health in the United States.

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“…As highlighted by Nelson and Spencer (2021), current sociological conceptualizations of race, maternal health, and well‐being have been limited to birth weight measures or self‐reported health. Examining the well‐being of Black mothers qualitatively allowed for further interrogation into the racialized pathways that are connected to their perceived well‐being.…”

Biathanatos revisited: Anabaptist perspectives on voluntarily stopping eating and drinking in the face of terminal illness

“…58 Interview participants were 93% White; scholars have shown that end-of-life experiences and perceptions vary by race. 80 Eighty-six percent of the sample was also over 40 years of age.…”