African Americans suffer disproportionately from the adverse health consequences of smoking, and also report substantially lower socioeconomic status than Whites and other racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. Although socioeconomic disadvantage is known to have a negative influence on smoking...

The long-term impact of income inequality on health has not been fully explored in the current literature. Until now, 4 studies have examined the lagged effect on population/group mortality rate at the aggregate level, and 7 studies have investigated the effect of income inequality on subsequent...

Our study used live telephone conversations between domestic violence perpetrators and victims to answer novel questions about how and why victims arrive at their decision to recant and/or refuse prosecution efforts. From October 2008 to June 2011, we conducted a qualitative study involving 25...

Sociological approaches to the social control of sickness have tended to focus on medicalization or the process through which social phenomena come to be regulated by medicine. Much less is known about how social problems historically understood as medical come to be governed by the criminal...

This article examines historical trends in the reporting of health and medicine in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune from the 1960s to the 2000s. It focuses on the extent to which health reporting can be said to have become increasingly politicized, or to have shifted from treating the...

In the U.S., supermarkets serve as an important source of year-round produce (Chung & Myers, 1999), and yet access to supermarkets may be scarce in “food deserts,” or poor, urban areas that lack sources of healthy, affordable food (Cummins & Macintyre, 2002). This study examined objective...

In the “decidedly hostile” federal context toward unauthorized immigrants in American healthcare (Newton & Adams, 2009, p. 422), a few subnational governments have implemented strategies seeking to expand their access to and utilization of care. In this article, I draw on interviews...

We apply neighborhood-based theories of social organization and environmental stress to examine variation in a key indicator of inflammation-related cardiovascular risk—C-reactive protein (CRP). Specifically, we emphasize the potentially health-compromising role of rapid increases in the crime...

During the first decade of the 21st century a new “dramatic story” about the growing global surrogacy industry brought renewed attention to surrogacy as a social problem and a health policy issue. This paper asks: What cultural assumptions about gender, family and the global reproductive...

This research explores commonplace discursive depictions of obesity surgery and individual patients’ reactions to these depictions. Data come from a content analysis of weight loss surgery representations in periodical articles (n = 32) and open-ended surveys (n = 55) and interviews...