Can structural discrimination be measured? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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George Floyd’s death and the pandemic have brought structural discrimination into awareness for many, especially with regard to its impact on health. Now Sarah Szanton, a researcher in the School of Nursing at Johns Hopkins, has created a measurement tool to assess its impact.

Szanton: We are developing a measure across nine different domains of people’s life experience, for example, the employment domain, the environment in terms of the toxic things, and income credit and wealth, media and marketing, then looking across people’s life course with all those domains, for example, the education funding where they grew up, employment factors. People have conceptualized this about structural discrimination and health and people have done some measurement but this will be the first time of trying to get all those contexts across the life course for individual people.  :32

Szanton says the tool will be validated and hopefully used to inform improvement measures as well as policy. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.