TY - JOUR
T1 - Jedi public health
T2 - Co-creating an identity-safe culture to promote health equity
AU - Geronimus, Arline T.
AU - James, Sherman A.
AU - Destin, Mesmin
AU - Graham, Louis F.
AU - Hatzenbuehler, Mark L.
AU - Murphy, Mary C.
AU - Pearson, Jay A.
AU - Omari, Amel
AU - Thompson, J. Phillip
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors wish to acknowledge research support from the National Institute of Aging (Grant #s R01 AG032632 and T32 AG00221 ); from the University of Michigan Centers for: Advancing Research on Societal Solutions ; Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health ; the Population Studies Center and Rackham Deans Strategic Fund; as well as from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University . We thank all the participants at the 2014 and 2015 Jedi Public Health Workshops in Ann Arbor and Stanford for helpful discussions, Professor Cleopatra Caldwell and Lynda Fuerstnau for facilitating the logistics of the 2014 workshop, and N.E. Barr for help with the production of the manuscript. We are particularly indebted to Executive Vice Chancellor Claude Steele, Dr. Rachel C. Snow, Professors Fred Turner, D. Fox Harrell, Larry Davis, Edna Viruell-Fuentes, Roberto DeVoglio, John Bound and Bruce McEwen, Aidan Geronimus, Charlie Geronimus and three anonymous reviewers for comments on previous drafts.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 The Authors.
PY - 2016/12/1
Y1 - 2016/12/1
N2 - The extent to which socially-assigned and culturally mediated social identity affects health depends on contingencies of social identity that vary across and within populations in day-to-day life. These contingencies are structurally rooted and health damaging inasmuch as they activate physiological stress responses. They also have adverse effects on cognition and emotion, undermining self-confidence and diminishing academic performance. This impact reduces opportunities for social mobility, while ensuring those who "beat the odds" pay a physical price for their positive efforts. Recent applications of social identity theory toward closing racial, ethnic, and gender academic achievement gaps through changing features of educational settings, rather than individual students, have proved fruitful. We sought to integrate this evidence with growing social epidemiological evidence that structurally-rooted biopsychosocial processes have population health effects. We explicate an emergent framework, Jedi Public Health (JPH). JPH focuses on changing features of settings in everyday life, rather than individuals, to promote population health equity, a high priority, yet, elusive national public health objective. We call for an expansion and, in some ways, a re-orienting of efforts to eliminate population health inequity. Policies and interventions to remove and replace discrediting cues in everyday settings hold promise for disrupting the repeated physiological stress process activation that fuels population health inequities with potentially wide application.
AB - The extent to which socially-assigned and culturally mediated social identity affects health depends on contingencies of social identity that vary across and within populations in day-to-day life. These contingencies are structurally rooted and health damaging inasmuch as they activate physiological stress responses. They also have adverse effects on cognition and emotion, undermining self-confidence and diminishing academic performance. This impact reduces opportunities for social mobility, while ensuring those who "beat the odds" pay a physical price for their positive efforts. Recent applications of social identity theory toward closing racial, ethnic, and gender academic achievement gaps through changing features of educational settings, rather than individual students, have proved fruitful. We sought to integrate this evidence with growing social epidemiological evidence that structurally-rooted biopsychosocial processes have population health effects. We explicate an emergent framework, Jedi Public Health (JPH). JPH focuses on changing features of settings in everyday life, rather than individuals, to promote population health equity, a high priority, yet, elusive national public health objective. We call for an expansion and, in some ways, a re-orienting of efforts to eliminate population health inequity. Policies and interventions to remove and replace discrediting cues in everyday settings hold promise for disrupting the repeated physiological stress process activation that fuels population health inequities with potentially wide application.
KW - Gender
KW - Health equity
KW - LGBTQ
KW - Population health
KW - Race/ethnicity
KW - Social identity
KW - Stereotype threat
KW - Weathering
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ssmph.2016.02.008
DO - 10.1016/j.ssmph.2016.02.008
M3 - Review article
C2 - 27022616
AN - SCOPUS:84960872830
SN - 2352-8273
VL - 2
SP - 105
EP - 116
JO - SSM - Population Health
JF - SSM - Population Health
ER -