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Characterizing and Measuring Racial Discrimination in Public Health Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2023

Morgan Thompson
Morgan Thompson*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany
*
Email: morgan.thompson@uni-bielefeld.de
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Abstract

Experiences of racial discrimination can seem to be caused by one’s race, a combination of social identities, or non-social features. In other words, racial discrimination can be intersectional or attributionally ambiguous. This poses challenges for current understandings and measurement tools of racial discrimination in public health research, such as the explanation of racial health disparities. Different kinds of discriminatory experiences plausibly produce different psychological effects that mediate their negative health impacts. Thus, multiple characterizations and measurements of racial discrimination are needed. As a result, I argue that racial discrimination should be a polysemous concept (with multiple meanings).

Type
Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 90 , Issue 3 , July 2023 , pp. 721 - 743
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association

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