Interwoven Social Determinants: Race, Education, and Health in the United States

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018Educational attainment and racial assignment are essential determinants of health in the United States. Despite broad interest in how these social factors affect well-being, understanding of how they interact to simultaneously influence health is limited. Indeed, comprehension of how education manifests as a determinant of health across racial groups is largely constrained to comparisons of population averages and effect-sizes. To help develop foundations about how race, education, and health interact in the United States, I compare Black and White sample populations in terms of the effect that attaining a college degree has on self-rated health. In addition to describing how Black and White populations differ in average effects, I: (1) describe how both populations vary in how education is leveraged to protect health; (2) examine how educational gradients vary within Black and within White populations--and what differences in within-group behavior say about inequality between groups; and (3) explicate how residential context--a social feature that is organized by race in the US--modifies the association among education and health. Taken together, these three chapters demonstrate that education is a racialized social process, or that how education comes to bear on health is heavily dependent--in multiple and complex ways--upon one's racial assignment