INTEGRATING INDIVIDUAL- AND COMMUNITY-LEVEL SES DATA IN ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH TRACKING: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Abstract

ISEE-315 Abstract: Studies in the environmental health and sociology literature suggest that communities of color and the poor bear a disproportionate burden of exposure to environmental hazards such as proximity to industrial facilities, toxic waste sites, exposure to ambient air pollution, and their associated health risks. These studies raise the question of how much persistent health disparities among communities may be partially explained by disparities in exposures to environmental hazards. The use of SES data for understanding health disparities has become an important area of study, but has only recently been incorporated into environmental health research due to policy concerns about environmental inequalities. The development of an Environmental and Public Health Tracking (EPHT) system provides an unprecedented opportunity to integrate demographic and SES data to identify disparities in environmental exposures and health outcomes over time and over a large geographic scale. This presentation will examine methods and data sources for measuring individual- and community-level SES data that have potential for use in an EPHT network. Specifically, we show how SES data can be integrated with environmental exposure and toxicity information to identify demographic disparities in exposures and estimated health risks among diverse populations.