The Growing Color Divide in US Infant Mortality, a new report from the Population Reference Bureau by Rogelia Saenz, professor of sociology at Texas A&M University, examines racial disparities in health beginning at birth.

White students were less segregated from minority students in 2005-2006 than they were in 1993-1994, but over the same period black and Hispanic students became slightly more isolated from white students, according to an analysis of the Education Department’s Common Core of Data (CCD) Public School Universe Survey by the Pew Hispanic Center. The center’s report attributes the seemingly contradictory trend to Latinos comprising a larger proportion, and whites a smaller proportion, of the student population.

Citation: Rick Fry (2007, August). The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of U.S. Public Schools. Pew Hispanic Center. (Available online)

Foreign-born Latino workers moved out of the low end of wage distribution into the middle between 1995 and 2005, according to an analysis of CPS data by the Pew Hispanic Center.

Citation: Rakesh Kochhar (2007, August). 1995–2005: Foreign-Born Latinos Make Progress on Wages. Pew Hispanic Center. (Available online)

Collectively, more Asian American college and university students are experiencing obstacles to academic success in US higher education than in the past, according to a new UCLA report. The report, Beyond Myths: The Growth and Diversity of Asian American College Freshmen, 1971–2005, is available for order from the Higher Education Research Institute.

There is some discussion about the data used in the report on the Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog.

Unnatural Causes, a 7-part documentary series about socioeconomic and racial disparities and health, will air on PBS in 2008 and will also be available on DVD. For more about the project and the documentary, see the Unnatural Causes Web site.

Researchers are looking at racism and discrimination as an explanation for black men’s health disparities which cannot be explained by socioeconomic status alone, according to an article in the Baltimore Sun. Vickie Mays at the UCLA Center on Research, Education, Training and Strategic Communication on Minority Health Disparities has conducted research about the body’s physiological response to stress, such as that resulting from discrimination, and health. Other researchers, like George Howard of the University of Alabama Birmingham’s biostatistics department, say that while racism plays a role in health disparities, socioeconomic status is the primary cause.

Citations:

Vickie M. Mays, Susan D. Cochran, and Namdi W. Barnes (2007). Race, race-based discrimination, and health outcomes among African Americans. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 201-225.

George Howard, Darwin R. Labarthe, Jianfang Hu, Sarah Yoon, and Virginia J. Howard (2007). Regional differences in African Americans’ high risk for stroke: The remarkable burden of stroke for southern African Americans. Annals of Epidemiology, 9, 689-696.

• Interpreting 12th-Graders’ NAEP-Scaled Mathematics Performance Using High School Predictors and Postsecondary Outcomes From the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88)
• Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities
  In addition to presenting educational indicators for racial and ethnic minority compared to each other and to white students, this report uses data from the American Community Survey to detail educational differences among Hispanic subgroups.

A group of researchers at RAND have created a group of data sets call the Center for Population Health and Health Disparities Data Core. The CPHHD Data Core houses a large number of measures derived for a variety of substantive areas in several distinct data series including: Cost-of-Living, Disability, Pollution, Population and Housing Characteristics, Segregation Indices, and Street Connectivity. The number and comprehensiveness of the measures derived within each series vary according to the expansiveness of the substantive area. Click here for more information.

The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured has released several new resources dealing with child and family health coverage, including focus group results and national and state estimates of coverage by race/ethnicity and poverty level.

The Census Bureau reported yesterday that the minority population is over 100 million, and about 1 in 3 US residents is a minority. See the press release for links to details tables of the new population estimates.