目标:空气污染暴露中的种族不平等现象已得到记录。也有兴趣记录种族在空气污染与健康之间的联系中的变化作用。然而,这方面的实证文献产生了喜忧参半的结果,可能不清楚的政策含义。我们批判性地评估了最近关于种族和空气污染暴露对美国成人死亡率的互动关联的实证论文,作为种族的案例研究,污染,和健康文献。具体来说,我们评估这些研究是为了概念化和讨论种族以及种族变量的使用,这些变量可能导致本特定文献和更广泛文献中的模糊结果和政策含义.
结果:我们评估了2016年至2022年关于种族在短期和长期PM2.5暴露与特定类型的成人死亡率之间的关联中的修饰作用的十项实证研究(所有原因,非偶然,和心脏或心血管疾病)在美国。除了比较和对比实证结果外,我们将重点放在概念化上,测量,建模,并讨论种族和种族变量。总的来说,结果表明,种族在PM2.5暴露与死亡率之间没有一致的关系.此外,对种族的概念化和讨论通常是简短而不完整的,即使实证结果出乎意料或违反直觉。以流行病学和环境流行病学文献中最近的讨论为基础,更具体地说,我们详细讨论了种族的含义,种族变量,以及一些人认为由种族变量代理的文化和结构种族主义。我们使用人文科学和社会科学的理论奖学金以及环境文献的实证工作,为未来的研究提供建议,为社会和环境政策提供证据基础。
Racial inequities in air pollution exposure have been documented. There is also interest in documenting the modifying role of race in the link between air pollution and health. However, the empirical literature in this area has yielded mixed results with potentially unclear policy implications. We critically evaluate recent empirical papers on the interactive association between race and air pollution exposure on adult mortality in the USA as a
case study of the race, pollution, and health literature. Specifically, we evaluate these studies for the conceptualization and discussion of race and the use of race variables that may contribute to the ambiguous results and policy implications both in this specific literature and in the broader literature.
We evaluate ten empirical studies from 2016 to 2022 on the modifying role of race in the association between short- and long-term PM2.5 exposure and specific types of adult mortality (all cause, non-accidental, and heart or cardiovascular diseases) in the USA. In addition to comparing and contrasting the empirical results, we focus our review on the conceptualization, measurement, modeling, and discussion of race and the race variables. Overall, the results indicate no consistent role of race in the association between PM2.5 exposure and mortality. Moreover, conceptualization and discussion of race was often brief and incomplete, even when the empirical results were unexpected or counterintuitive. To build on recent discussions in the epidemiology and environmental epidemiology literature more specifically, we provide a detailed discussion of the meaning of race, the race variables, and the cultural and structural racism that some argue are proxied by race variables. We use theoretical scholarship from the humanities and social sciences along with empirical work from the environmental literature to provide recommendations for future research that can provide an evidence base to inform both social and environmental policy.