How do resilience and structural discrimination intersect with regard to health? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Structural discrimination impacts very negatively on health, with resilience as a factor that can help modify it. Sarah Szanton, a researcher in the School of Nursing at Johns Hopkins, has developed measures of both.

Szanton: In the resilience world it’s usually measured individually, so are you a good coper? Are your religious? And then sometimes includes the family, did you have two parents growing up? There’s very little about community resilience, family resilience, biological resilience are all kind of put together, even though we know that those are all related, so for example Hurricane Katrina happened. More people died because of the way the community was set up and how segregated it was and resources, those individuals died partly because of aspects of the community.  :32

Szanton intends for both measures to be used to help individuals assess their own risk and also to assist governmental bodies in their reform efforts. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.