Community Health Commons^™

Culture And The Social Context Of Health Inequalities, Carol Leler Mansyur, Benjamin C. Amick Iii, Luisa Franzini, Robert E. Roberts

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

There is a great deal of recent interest and debate concerning the linkages between inequality and health cross-nationally. The U.S. National Institutes of Health recommended in 2001 that any new research on health disparities should include social and cultural systems as units of analysis. Nevertheless, many public health interventions and policies continue to decontextualize risk factors from the social environment. Exposures to social and health inequalities probably vary as a consequence of different cultural contexts. To identify the processes that cause social and health inequalities, it is important to understand culture's influence. Navarro's research on political institutions and inequality illustrates …