health inequalities: evidence from systematic reviews
C Bambra,1
M Gibson,2
A Sowden,3
K Wright,3
M Whitehead,4
M Petticrew5
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Monday, June 3, 2013
Social determinants of health
Tackling the wider social determinants of health and
health inequalities: evidence from systematic reviews
C Bambra,1
M Gibson,2
A Sowden,3
K Wright,3
M Whitehead,4
M Petticrew5
health inequalities: evidence from systematic reviews
C Bambra,1
M Gibson,2
A Sowden,3
K Wright,3
M Whitehead,4
M Petticrew5
Monday, April 22, 2013
Relationships Are More Important Than Ambition
Kasser, the author of The High Price of Materialism, has shown that the pursuit of materialistic values like money, possessions, and social status-the fruits of career successes-leads to lower well-being and more distress in individuals. It is also damaging to relationships: "My colleagues and I have found," Kasser writes, "that when people believe materialistic values are important, they...have poorer interpersonal relationships [and] contribute less to the community." Such people are also more likely to objectify others, using them as means to achieve their own goals.
So if the pursuit of career success comes at the expense of social bonds, then an individual's well-being could suffer. That's because community is strongly connected to well-being.
In the form of marriage, family, ties to friends and neighbors, civic engagement, workplace ties, and social trust -- "all appear independently and robustly related to happiness and life satisfaction, both directly and through their impact on health."
In Canada and the United States, having frequent contact with neighbors was associated with higher levels of well-being, as was the feeling of truly belonging in a group. "If everyone in a community becomes more connected, the average level of subjective well-being would increase," they wrote.
In another study, Putnam and a colleague found that people who attend religious services regularly are, thanks to the community element, more satisfied with their lives than those who do not. Their well-being was not linked to their religious beliefs or worshipping practices, but to the number of friends they had at church. People with ten or more friends at their religious services were about twice as satisfied with their lives than people who had no friends there.
These outcomes are interesting given that relationships and community pose some challenges to our assumptions about the good life. After all, relationships and community impose constraints on freedom, binding people to something larger than themselves. The assumption in our culture is that limiting freedom is detrimental to well-being. That is true to a point. Barry Schwartz, a psychological researcher based at Swarthmore College, has done extensive research suggesting that too much freedom -- or a lack of constraints -- is detrimental to human happiness.
"Relationships are meant to constrain," Schwartz told me, "but if you're always on the lookout for better, such constraints are experienced with bitterness and resentment."
Dreher has come to see the virtue of constraints. Reflecting on what he went through when Ruthie was sick, he told me that the secret to the good life is "setting limits and being grateful for what you have. That was what Ruthie did, which is why I think she was so happy, even to the end."
Meanwhile, many of his East Coast friends, who chased after money and good jobs, certainly achieved success, but felt otherwise empty and alone. As Dreher was writing his book, one told him, "Everything I've done has been for career advancement ... And we have done well. But we are alone in the world." He added: "Almost everybody we know is like that."
"Community means more than many of us realize," he says. "It certainly means more than your job."
http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/relationships-are-more-important-than-ambition/275025/
So if the pursuit of career success comes at the expense of social bonds, then an individual's well-being could suffer. That's because community is strongly connected to well-being.
In the form of marriage, family, ties to friends and neighbors, civic engagement, workplace ties, and social trust -- "all appear independently and robustly related to happiness and life satisfaction, both directly and through their impact on health."
In Canada and the United States, having frequent contact with neighbors was associated with higher levels of well-being, as was the feeling of truly belonging in a group. "If everyone in a community becomes more connected, the average level of subjective well-being would increase," they wrote.
In another study, Putnam and a colleague found that people who attend religious services regularly are, thanks to the community element, more satisfied with their lives than those who do not. Their well-being was not linked to their religious beliefs or worshipping practices, but to the number of friends they had at church. People with ten or more friends at their religious services were about twice as satisfied with their lives than people who had no friends there.
These outcomes are interesting given that relationships and community pose some challenges to our assumptions about the good life. After all, relationships and community impose constraints on freedom, binding people to something larger than themselves. The assumption in our culture is that limiting freedom is detrimental to well-being. That is true to a point. Barry Schwartz, a psychological researcher based at Swarthmore College, has done extensive research suggesting that too much freedom -- or a lack of constraints -- is detrimental to human happiness.
"Relationships are meant to constrain," Schwartz told me, "but if you're always on the lookout for better, such constraints are experienced with bitterness and resentment."
Dreher has come to see the virtue of constraints. Reflecting on what he went through when Ruthie was sick, he told me that the secret to the good life is "setting limits and being grateful for what you have. That was what Ruthie did, which is why I think she was so happy, even to the end."
Meanwhile, many of his East Coast friends, who chased after money and good jobs, certainly achieved success, but felt otherwise empty and alone. As Dreher was writing his book, one told him, "Everything I've done has been for career advancement ... And we have done well. But we are alone in the world." He added: "Almost everybody we know is like that."
"Community means more than many of us realize," he says. "It certainly means more than your job."
http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/relationships-are-more-important-than-ambition/275025/
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Can Sculptures Fix Buffalo's Urban Farming Program?
Like so many U.S. cities, Buffalo is replete with empty land. It's estimated that more than 20 percent of the city's land sits vacant. These mostly residential plots are becoming an unfortunate 21st century trademark of 20th century industrial power.
Some cities are attacking this problem by converting the empty space into urban gardens. But soil contamination makes growing edible food in the ground next to impossible. Currently, growers get around this by using raised beds, which limits how much they can produce.
That's where Brooklyn-based architect David Lagé comes in. Lagé and a team of designers would like to install sculptures that can double as above-ground growing structures. Lagé says these Artfarms will help the farms increase their yields and meet health standards for selling at farmer's markets and to restaurants.
And, he says, they could help turn the Buffalo's troubled East Side neighborhood, where much of the property is vacant, into a cultural destination.
Video here
The Atlantic Cities
Some cities are attacking this problem by converting the empty space into urban gardens. But soil contamination makes growing edible food in the ground next to impossible. Currently, growers get around this by using raised beds, which limits how much they can produce.
That's where Brooklyn-based architect David Lagé comes in. Lagé and a team of designers would like to install sculptures that can double as above-ground growing structures. Lagé says these Artfarms will help the farms increase their yields and meet health standards for selling at farmer's markets and to restaurants.
And, he says, they could help turn the Buffalo's troubled East Side neighborhood, where much of the property is vacant, into a cultural destination.
Video here
The Atlantic Cities
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
STRUCTURAL RACISM AND COMMUNITY BUILDING
-How is it that a nation legally committed to equal opportunity for all—
regardless of race, creed, national origin, or gender—continually reproduces
patterns of racial inequality?
-Why, in the world’s wealthiest country, is there such enduring poverty among
people of color?
-How is it that in our open, participatory democracy, racial minorities are still
underrepresented in positions of power and decision making?
Without fully accounting for the historical and ongoing ways in which racial dynamics produce inequities between whites and people of color, the social justice and antipoverty field risks pursuing strategies that are misguided, incomplete, or inappropriate to the challenge.
The statistical portrait of the American population broken out by race reveals persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality of life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.
The statistical portrait of the American population broken out by race reveals persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality of life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.
The correlation between race and well-being in America remains
powerful.
Beginning with the expropriation of Native American lands, a racialized system of power and privilege developed and white dominance became the national common sense, opening the door to the enslavement of Africans, the taking of Mexican lands, and the limits set on Asian immigrants (8).
Over time, beliefs and practices about
power and privilege were woven into
national legal and political doctrine.
While committing to principles of
freedom, opportunity, and democracy,
America found ways to justify slavery,
for example, by defining Africans as nonhuman. This made it possible to deny
Africans rights and freedoms granted
to “all men” who were “created equal.”
Only when white Southerners wanted
to increase their political power in the
legislature did they advocate to upgrade
Africans’ legal status to three-fifths of a
human being. Thus, from the earliest
moments in our history, racial group
identities granted access to resources and
power to those who were “white” while
excluding those who were “other” legally,
politically, and socially.
Racism in twenty-first century America is harder to see than its previous incarnations because the most overt and legally sanctioned forms of racial discrimination have been eliminated. Nonetheless, subtler racialized patterns in policies and practices permeate the political, economic, and sociocultural structures of America in ways that generate differences in well-being between people of color and whites. These dynamics work to maintain the existing racial hierarchy even as they adapt with the times or accommodate new racial and ethnic groups. This contemporary manifestation of racism in America can be called “structural racism (9).”
White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks (18).
. . . . whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and
average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as
work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage . . . is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all.”
-Peggy MacIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the In
“. . . a child born in the bottom 10
percent of families ranked by income
has a 31 percent chance of ending
up there as an adult and a 51 percent
chance of ending up in the bottom
20 percent, while one born in the top
10 percent has a 30 percent chance
of staying there.”
Psychological studies of African American adolescents have demonstrated that consistent negative imaging contributes to negative self-acceptance and mental health problems (22).
Moreover, the attitudes that manifest
themselves at the individual level can
also aggregate all the way up into a
national consensus about race that,
in turn, influences policies, practices,
and representations. Experimental
studies of the effects of news stories
on the public suggest that television
images have the potential to catalyze
and reinforce opinions about public
policies that contribute to racially disparate outcomes: “A mere five-second exposure to a
mug shot of African American and Hispanic youth offenders [in a 15-minute newscast]
raises levels of fear among viewers, increases support for ‘get tough’ crime policies, and
promotes racial stereotyping.”
---EDUCATION---
Public education is probably the national system that holds the greatest potential for reducing racial inequities over time.
Looking closely at specific school districts reveals even greater inequities in investments. In the predominately white school district of Manhasset, just outside New York City, students receive twice as many resources as their predominately black and Latino counterparts in or close to New York City’s urban core (28).
RACIAL EQUITY ITSELF NEEDS TO BE A PRIORITY OBJECTIVE OF ANYONE COMMITTED TO PROMOTING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL JUSTICE.
The implication for action is that social change leaders must adopt an explicitly raceconscious approach to their work: they must factor race into their analysis of the causes of the problems they are addressing, and they must factor race into their strategies to promote change and equity.
Source
regardless of race, creed, national origin, or gender—continually reproduces
patterns of racial inequality?
-Why, in the world’s wealthiest country, is there such enduring poverty among
people of color?
-How is it that in our open, participatory democracy, racial minorities are still
underrepresented in positions of power and decision making?
Without fully accounting for the historical and ongoing ways in which racial dynamics produce inequities between whites and people of color, the social justice and antipoverty field risks pursuing strategies that are misguided, incomplete, or inappropriate to the challenge.
The statistical portrait of the American population broken out by race reveals persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality of life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.
The statistical portrait of the American population broken out by race reveals persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality of life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.
The correlation between race and well-being in America remains
powerful.
Beginning with the expropriation of Native American lands, a racialized system of power and privilege developed and white dominance became the national common sense, opening the door to the enslavement of Africans, the taking of Mexican lands, and the limits set on Asian immigrants (8).
Over time, beliefs and practices about
power and privilege were woven into
national legal and political doctrine.
While committing to principles of
freedom, opportunity, and democracy,
America found ways to justify slavery,
for example, by defining Africans as nonhuman. This made it possible to deny
Africans rights and freedoms granted
to “all men” who were “created equal.”
Only when white Southerners wanted
to increase their political power in the
legislature did they advocate to upgrade
Africans’ legal status to three-fifths of a
human being. Thus, from the earliest
moments in our history, racial group
identities granted access to resources and
power to those who were “white” while
excluding those who were “other” legally,
politically, and socially.
Racism in twenty-first century America is harder to see than its previous incarnations because the most overt and legally sanctioned forms of racial discrimination have been eliminated. Nonetheless, subtler racialized patterns in policies and practices permeate the political, economic, and sociocultural structures of America in ways that generate differences in well-being between people of color and whites. These dynamics work to maintain the existing racial hierarchy even as they adapt with the times or accommodate new racial and ethnic groups. This contemporary manifestation of racism in America can be called “structural racism (9).”
White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks (18).
. . . . whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and
average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as
work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage . . . is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all.”
-Peggy MacIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the In
“. . . a child born in the bottom 10
percent of families ranked by income
has a 31 percent chance of ending
up there as an adult and a 51 percent
chance of ending up in the bottom
20 percent, while one born in the top
10 percent has a 30 percent chance
of staying there.”
Psychological studies of African American adolescents have demonstrated that consistent negative imaging contributes to negative self-acceptance and mental health problems (22).
Moreover, the attitudes that manifest
themselves at the individual level can
also aggregate all the way up into a
national consensus about race that,
in turn, influences policies, practices,
and representations. Experimental
studies of the effects of news stories
on the public suggest that television
images have the potential to catalyze
and reinforce opinions about public
policies that contribute to racially disparate outcomes: “A mere five-second exposure to a
mug shot of African American and Hispanic youth offenders [in a 15-minute newscast]
raises levels of fear among viewers, increases support for ‘get tough’ crime policies, and
promotes racial stereotyping.”
---EDUCATION---
Public education is probably the national system that holds the greatest potential for reducing racial inequities over time.
Looking closely at specific school districts reveals even greater inequities in investments. In the predominately white school district of Manhasset, just outside New York City, students receive twice as many resources as their predominately black and Latino counterparts in or close to New York City’s urban core (28).
RACIAL EQUITY ITSELF NEEDS TO BE A PRIORITY OBJECTIVE OF ANYONE COMMITTED TO PROMOTING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL JUSTICE.
The implication for action is that social change leaders must adopt an explicitly raceconscious approach to their work: they must factor race into their analysis of the causes of the problems they are addressing, and they must factor race into their strategies to promote change and equity.
Source
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)