Diversions: When Disparities Research Becomes Complicit in the Reproduction of Health Inequalities

• In Event: 3421 - Health Equity, Social Justice, and Social Movements

Abstract

Two dominant frameworks, stress process and fundamental cause theory, provide an avenue toward understanding the origins of health inequalities. Both frameworks highlight the advantageous circumstances of people propitiously situated in socioeconomic and racial hierarchies. Yet health inequalities research turns the focus away from the actions of people with power and influence. Instead attention is directed to the behaviors and circumstances of disadvantaged groups. By doing so, attention is effectively diverted away from the actions of advantaged individuals and groups successfully providing them a pass with respect to absorbing any responsibility for disparities-producing action that may be theirs to own. We name this process: health inequality diversions, which are motivated and accepted by a research enterprise that diverts the source of inequality in “them” (the disadvantaged), their traits, their behaviors, their communities, their cultural orientations, their genes, and their presumed inability to be resilient. This paper provides an exposition of the diversion concept by providing examples of what a diversion diverts from, detailing specific examples of candidate diversions, indicate how such diversions become cultural explanations for why disparities exist, explicate mechanisms that lead diversionary accounts to become prominent, and end by highlighting the utility and value for such a conceptualization. We hope that medical and mental health sociologists specifically, and social scientists and public health researchers more broadly, can act to implement a shift in how we conceptualize and design research studies aimed at eradicating health inequities.

Authors

• Bruce G. Link, University of California-Riverside

• San Juanita García, University of California, Santa Barbara