Patterns Of Inequality Research Articles

Children's thinking about group-based social hierarchies.

Wealth, power, and status are distributed unevenly across social groups. A surge of recent research reveals that people being recognizing, representing, and reasoning about group-based patterns of inequity during the first years of life. We first synthesize recent research on what children learn about group-based social hierarchies as well as how this learning occurs. We then discuss how children not only learn about societal structures but become active participants in them. Studying the origins and development of children's thoughts and behavior regarding group-based social hierarchies provides valuable insight into how systems of inequity are perpetuated across generations and how intergroup biases related to wealth, power, and status may be mitigated and reshaped early in development.

Introduction: Quo Vadis , Latin America? Human Rights, Environmental Governance and the Sustainable Development Goals

Introduction: <scp> <i>Quo Vadis</i> </scp> , Latin America? Human Rights, Environmental Governance and the Sustainable Development Goals

Hazards of Anti-Blackness in the United States.

On February 26, 2012, a Black child, Trayvon Martin, was executed in Sanford, Florida. Seventeen months later his killer was found not guilty. This is but one example of the state's brazen disregard for Black life, rooted in the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans more than 400 years ago, and the ways in which they and their descendants were systematically tortured. Trayvon Martin's murder catalyzed the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which names and resists deeply entrenched state violence and inequities against Black people in the U.S. In this manuscript we: (1) summarize examples of structural disregard for Black lives in the U.S.; (2) describe how this disregard is reflected in differential patterns of social inequities, morbidity, and mortality; and (3) discuss how we can better employ the BLM perspective to frame a more historicized understanding of patterns in population health and to envision ways to resist health inequities.

Reading Mozambique’s mega-project developmentalism through the workplace: evidence from Chinese and Brazilian investments

ABSTRACT Propelled by a commodities boom and expanding South–South investment, mega-projects have reshaped the politics of labour in many African settings. Reflecting on such dynamics, this article critically engages with questions of employment, skills development, and contestation re-configuring capital–labour encounters in the ‘Chinese’ and ‘Brazilian’ workplace in Mozambique. We analyse two mega-projects: the Maputo Ring Road, implemented by the China Road and Bridge Corporation, and the Moatize Coal Project, led by the Brazilian mining company, Vale SA. Engaging with the complex realities at project ground level, the article unpacks how workplace regimes and outcomes reflect an intricate, multi-scalar array of spatial encounters, sector-specific characteristics, and national political economies. For both cases, this is associated with common promises of development and prosperity for Mozambique. While such promises take on different ideational guises, we show that the Chinese and Brazilian workplaces expose, nonetheless, overlapping patterns of inequality, contention, and hostility, reinforced by broader vulnerabilities and imbalances in global production networks and the Mozambican political economy. By providing a ground-level reading of the multi-scalar forces at play in the workplace, this article sheds light on the relationship between emerging South–South global encounters, national political realities, and labour geographies in African contexts shaped by mega-projects.

Understanding Inclusive Placemaking Processes through the Case of Klostergata56 in Norway

Public participation and the placemaking approach are receiving continuously increasing attention and are therefore likely to become, in a near future, the norm of shaping our cities. They are instruments of local democracy, enabling citizens to stake a claim and exercise their influence on the city, repositioning them from recipients to active participants in this shaping. Research has shown that these democratic processes are the best way to ensure better physical environments, while also bringing social development. However, this attempt to shift from government to governance by power redistribution can at times pose a challenge to democracy, by repeating existing power relations between participating actors. If representation is not done right and communities are not equally engaged, the social benefits are at stake and issues of inclusion and exclusion arise. The need for assessment in this field is therefore highly relevant, but little progress has been done in developing measurable evaluation tools.This article is based on action research, following as a case study the process of co-designing Klostergata56, a small, underutilized public space in the Norwegian city of Trondheim. It presents a new framework of evaluating a participatory process, applied to the project to investigate its level of inclusion.Results of the study showed that the process had significant limitations to being inclusive to the expense of marginalized groups, due to unequal participation of stakeholders and differences in levels of nurtured social capital and civic trust. The challenges highlighted by the research make it possible to identify lessons for further processes to be more inclusive. Until such challenges are addressed, participatory placemaking will continue to be a trial-and-error process, therefore bound to repeat, at least to some extent, the inequality patterns present in a society.&#x0D; &#x0D; Read the full article in accessible html-format here.

Campus Climate Assessments: Limitations of Siloing Sexual Violence and Diversity Surveys

ABSTRACT Climate surveys are common tools for assessing and improving the experience at institutions of higher education. However, methodological limitations currently exist as assessment tools tend to be siloed with climate surveys assessing sexual misconduct on campus generally failing to assess issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and vice versa. As a result of this siloing, institutions of higher education possess a limited ability to notice and address patterns of injustice and inequity that cut across campus climate domains. This review summarizes the limitations of siloing sexual misconduct and diversity and inclusion climate assessments and provides a theoretical framework that emphasizes the importance of utilizing a comprehensive approach to assessing campus climate. From this framework we derive theoretical and practical recommendations for researchers and practitioners to advance scholarship and guide institutional research, planning, and practice.

Uneven geographies of youth volunteering in Uganda: Multi-scalar discourses and practices

This paper develops a multi-scalar geography of youth volunteering in Uganda. A growing body of research has explored the geographies of volunteering in the global North and international volunteering and development. However, despite the mainstreaming of volunteers as development actors, less attention has been paid to the unique local and national geographies of volunteering in global South settings. This paper explores how and why different ideas and practices of volunteering take shape and prominence in Uganda and how this impacts patterns of youth inclusion, inequality and opportunity. Analysing data on volunteering by young refugees in Uganda, we develop a multi-scalar geography to situate volunteering at the interface of ‘global’ volunteering policy and knowledges, aid and development architectures, youth unemployment, community institutions and local socio-economic inequalities. Through this, we reveal how programmed and audited forms of youth volunteering oriented to youth skills and employability are privileged. We show how this articulates with local inequalities to create uneven access to volunteering opportunities and practices. Through our approach, we show how a multi-scalar geography of volunteering enables us to build richer, more nuanced conceptualisations of volunteering in the global South that address the different ways global discourses, local histories, community organisations and social inequalities come together across space and time to produce uneven geographies of volunteering in particular places.

Precarity and Resilience: The Wellbeing of U.S. Latinos in a Time of Mounting Climate Change

This environmental epidemiology article examines the understudied issue of Latino risk in the context of climate change. The largest ethnic minority group in the U.S., Latino socioeconomic characteristics put them disproportionately in harm’s way for the adverse health impacts of climate change, including being subject to diverse forms of discrimination in gaining access to government resources for prevention and recovery from climate impacts. The specific ways climate change is experienced in Latino communities varies by physical location, employment and residence patterns, and community resilience. Failure to address the threat of climate change, and to identify the specific needs of those who are most vulnerable, including not including them directly in preparedness planning, enhances the likelihood that official responses to climate change will perpetuate historic patterns of denial of Latino concerns about the environment, and existing patterns of inequality, and widen prevailing differences in climate-driven adversity.

Strength, Stamina, and Structural Violence in the Social Sciences

Stereotypical portrayals of the academy depict a progressive and inclusive institution, particularly in the social sciences, disciplines that engage with social and political topics including inequality. This article, however, details the extent to which the formal structures and informal culture of academic social science continue to reflect men’s bodies and lived experiences. Specifically, I draw on autoethnographic observations and personal reflections to demonstrate the valorization of extreme bodily strength and stamina, principal components of contemporary masculinity seemingly at odds with the scholarly endeavors of the ivory tower. Additionally, I reflect on the harms proliferated in this environment including physical, emotional, and economic violence; trauma; and the persistence of macro-level patterns of inequality.

Student vulnerabilities and confidence in learning in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT How did the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic impact student learning in higher education? Everywhere, Sars-CoV-2 struck hardest in the most disadvantaged communities. This paper asks whether the virus's disproportionate effect on more vulnerable groups is replicated among college and university students. Data come from approximately 3800 students studying at nine higher education institutions located in six different countries around the globe. Conventional imagery of the ‘Ivory Tower’ treats colleges and universities as cloistered academic spaces beyond the ‘real world.’ Such imagery suggests that the patterns of COVID-19 inequity seen in the general population might not hold within higher education. However, the composition of the post-secondary student body has become more diverse and more representative. This could mean that patterns of inequity from the general population might hold, although perhaps at muted strength, among college and university students. We investigate the higher education context, asking how the characteristics of students, such as their gender or family background, their digital access, and their living arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic, impacted their self-reported ability to learn. The paper finds that students in more difficult situations – no study space, too much noise, and poorer health – reported greater disruption to their learning than did their peers who experienced fewer challenging living arrangements. Vulnerability, as measured by students in traditionally marginalized positions, had smaller impacts on student's confidence in learning.

Inequalities in demand satisfied with modern methods of family planning among women aged 15–49 years: a secondary data analysis of Demographic and Health Surveys of six South Asian countries

ObjectiveTo estimate educational and wealth inequalities in demand satisfied with modern methods of family planning (mDFPS).DesignA secondary data analyses of Demographic and Health Surveys.SettingSix South Asian countries, Afghanistan (2015), Bangladesh...

Geographical accessibility to upper secondary education: an Italian regional case study

In this paper, a spatial analysis is performed to measure students’ access to the upper secondary education system. Based on the definition of quantitative indicators, the adopted approach is applied to an Italian regional case by exploiting the capabilities of a GIS software and using census tracts’ level data. The obtained results highlight geographical patterns of inequalities in access among students and shed light on the least served areas. Further analysis shows that accessibility reflects the degree of urbanization within the study region and that geographical distances are actual barriers to rural students since they are not compensated for by either economic status or the availability of digital infrastructures. The study offers empirical grounds to inform the decision-making process toward equity-in-access oriented interventions. Longer-term actions, as the activation of new schools (network expansion), the activation of new programs (service expansion) or the redistribution of their supply among the current network (network reorganization), as well as mid-term ones, like offering economic support for students’ mobility, or reinforcing digital connectivity, emerge as relevant to mitigate social exclusion.

Mental Well-Being during the COVID-19 Confinement among Adolescents in Catalonia: The Role of Demographic and Other COVID-Related Variables.

This study aimed to describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the social situation, self-perceived health status, and mental well-being of adolescents in Catalonia during home confinement, and to evaluate factors that are associated with poor overall mental well-being. An online cross-sectional study among a cohort of students (14–18 years old) of central Catalonia (DESKcohort) was performed during June–July 2020. Poisson regression models with robust variance were used to identify variables associated with “poor overall well-being,” measured by the short version of the Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale. Out of 303 participants, 42.1% reported a decrease in family income, and 32.8% a loss of parental employment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and these percentages were higher among people living in low socioeconomic neighborhoods (53.3% and 43.2%, respectively). Overall, 56.8% presented a poor overall well-being. Participants reporting a decrease in their family’s income (aPR = 1.33) and those knowing a close person or family who died of COVID-19 (aPR = 1.42) were more likely to report a poor overall well-being. This study highlights the patterns of inequality and social vulnerability for COVID-19 pandemic outcomes. Considering social inequalities, interventions are needed to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the physical and the psychological wellbeing of children and their families.

The more you need, the less you get: Intersectionality and the inverse care law in the Brazilian depression care cascade

ABSTRACT Substantial research has shown that the population distribution of major depressive disorder (MDD) is strongly influenced by race, gender, and socioeconomic position. However, a deeper understanding of inequities in access to care for MDD according to these social markers is yet to be reached. We use data from the 2019 Brazilian National Health Survey, which includes 87,187 respondents aged 18 years and over, to test two hypotheses derived from the inverse care law: women, Black, and low-education respondents have higher frequencies of MDD, but lower access to each step of the depression care cascade, including diagnosis by a health professional, regular healthcare visits, and access to specialised treatment (H1); low-education Black women show the highest MDD frequency and the lowest access to care across the entire cascade (H2). Partially supporting H1 and H2, our results reveal a bottleneck in the first step of the depression care cascade. While no racial inequities were observed in the MDD prevalence, Black individuals were less likely than whites to be diagnosed by a health professional (OR 0.74). Women (OR 2.64) and low-education (OR 1.18) were more likely to have probable MDD in relation to men and high-education respondents, respectively, but only women (OR 1.58) were more likely to be diagnosed. Low-education Black women were equally more likely to have probable MDD (OR 3.11) than high-education white men. Conversely, high-education white women emerged as the most likely to be diagnosed with MDD (OR 1.63). Our findings suggest the inverse care law applies to the depression care cascade in Brazil through indication that its healthcare system perpetuates a multilayered system of oppression that overlooks multiply marginalised individuals. We also show that adequate screening by health care professionals should mitigate the complex patterns of inequity revealed by our study.

Capital, Inequality, and Volunteering

In this paper, I adopt Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical and methodological framework to investigate patterns of inequality in volunteering fields and practices in Norway. Multiple correspondence analyses of national survey data indicate a hierarchically structured social space in Norway according to total volume of capital, while the positioning of different volunteer fields and practices seems to be more egalitarian with regard to capital possession, with some exceptions. This resonates well with established notions of the Norwegian civil society model as social democratic and egalitarian. Based on the discussions and findings, and considering growing social, cultural, and economic differences in many societies, I argue for a new volunteering research agenda better tailored for investigating social inequalities and differentiation in volunteering in different societal contexts, providing a new vantage point for understanding and explaining such inequalities.

COVID-19, crisis responses, and public policies: from the persistence of inequalities to the importance of policy design

AbstractThe coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has once again highlighted the importance of social inequalities during major crises, a reality that has clear implications for public policy. In this introductory article to the thematic issue of Policy and Society on COVID-19, inequalities, and public policies, we provide an overview of the nexus between crisis and inequality before exploring its importance for the study of policy stability and change, with a particular focus on policy design. Here, we stress the persistence of inequalities during major crises before exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to focus on these inequalities when the time comes to design policies in response to such crises. Paying close attention to the design of these policies is essential for the study of, and fight against, social inequalities in times of crisis. Both during and beyond crises, policy design should emphasize tackling with inequalities. This is the case because current design choices shape future patterns of social inequality.

Social disparities in students' intention to enter higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research consistently shows that students from academic households are more likely to enter higher education than students from non-academic households. These inequalities are only secondarily due to differences in performance (i.e., primary effects), but mostly due to students’ decision making behavior (i.e., secondary effects). The relative share to which primary effects and secondary effects mediate the effect of students’ educational background on their intention to enter higher education is affected by external conditions. One significant external influence that may have had an impact on social disparities in students’ educational choices is the COVID-19 pandemic. Herein, we present data from N = 596 upper secondary students (41.6% from non-academic households) that were collected in Germany in April 2021. Building on rational choice theory, we scrutinized students’ expected benefits (i.e., employment prospects and personal significance), costs (i.e., direct costs and opportunity costs), and subjective probability of success in pursuing higher education as important psychological pillars for their intention to enter higher education. Results show that about 14% of social differences in students’ intention to enter higher education were due to primary effects, whereas almost 77% were explained by secondary effects. Specifically, we found that differences in the evaluation of benefits most strongly contributed to social inequalities in students’ intention to enroll in higher education. Compared to research on pre- COVID-19 cohorts, our results point to shifts in existing patterns of inequalities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Historical redlining and food environments: A study of 102 urban areas in the United States.

Unhealthy food environments are disproportionally concentrated in neighborhoods with clustering of racial/ethnic minorities and poverty. This disparity has been blamed, in part, on market self-regulation. This explanation risks overlooking past and current practices of racial segregation that have created and reinforced the obstacles blocking investments from food retailers in marginalized neighborhoods. We fill this gap by investigating how the long-term ramifications of redlining, discriminatory housing practices enacted by federal Home Owner Lending Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s, has evolved generations later to disproportionally exposing neighborhoods to unhealthy food environments. We overlaid historical redlining maps over 2010 food environment observations at the census tract level to identify areas with less healthy food environments and to assess the historical context of those areas. For 11,651 census tracts within 102 U.S. urban areas, we described the healthiness of food environments as measured by the modified retail food environment index (mRFEI). Using hurdle models with random effects, we further examined the association between redlining housing practice and food environments. The results indicate that historically redlined neighborhoods show a higher likelihood for unhealthy retail food environments even for census tracts with present-day economic and racial privilege. The current evidence shows how structural discrimination manifested by unjust housing practices and racial residential segregation fueled an uneven food environment where minority neighborhoods disproportionally bore the brunt of restrictive food access. It highlights an urgent need to ameliorate patterns of housing inequality as a fix to unequal food environments.

Knowledge production for whom? Doing migrations, colonialities and standpoints in non-hegemonic migration research

ABSTRACT Building on the representation problem of migration studies, this article identifies current alternative knowledge production strategies in social scientific migration research. After reviewing calls for denaturalization, demigranticization and decolonization, it elaborates on an integrated “umbrella” perspective – the doing-migration approach – for implementing these alternative strategies. First, building on the socioconstructivist and performativist accounts, the article pleads for studying the institutional and non-institutional sayings and doings about “migration” that generate historic-specific and changeable migranticized societal orders. Second, the article synthesizes the doing-migration approach and coloniality/ies-sensitive approaches to explicitly study long-term, large-scale power asymmetries and patterns of inequalities in the context of the postcolonial, postsocialist and neo-colonial dynamics. Finally, in addressing the question “Who has the power of definition within migration studies?”, this article differentiates between the concepts of standpoint and positionality.

Unraveling social inequalities in urban health care accessibility in Montevideo: A space-time approach

ABSTRACT Access to urban health care opportunities is a major factor in explaining health outcomes. We propose an innovative methodology to analyze spatio-temporal accessibility considering spatial, temporal, and individual variability on both the demand and the supply side. To construct the measure, we use three primary sources: an exhaustive survey of the space-time provision of pediatric services in Montevideo (i.e., a survey of the times when pediatric care appointments are available at particular clinic locations), a representative sample of pediatric health care users, and a fine-grained travel-time matrix for different transport modes. Our results show that, while different socioeconomic groups have similar levels of access at the aggregate level, access is not evenly distributed. Poorer households compose the highest percentage of households facing a critical lack of access. In addition, we find that space-time constraints associated with employment limit access for low-socioeconomic households more so than for other socioeconomic groups. This methodological contribution allows us to reveal existing inequality patterns in health care access and indicates the need for policymakers to consider the space-time dimensions of access when developing health care policies.