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...

While the relationship between education and general health has been firmly established in the literature, surprisingly little research has analyzed individual components of the global health judgments, such as chronic conditions or pain. We present a systematic account of the health gradient...

This article analyzes how “ethnic concordance” (i.e., matching the ethnicity of patients and healthcare workers) shapes patients' experiences of clinical interaction. Adopting the Habermasian framework of lifeworld-medicine contention, we inductively analyze 60 in-depth interviews with...

We examined the association between neighborhood minority diversity and infant birthweight among non-Hispanic US-born black women and foreign-born black women from Sub-Saharan Africa and the non-Spanish speaking Caribbean using 2002–2006 vital statistics birth record data from the state of New...

Latino immigrants exhibit health declines with increasing duration in the United States, which some attribute to a loss in social status after migration or downward social mobility. Yet, research into the distribution of perceived social mobility and patterned associations to Latino health is...

Increasing obesity rates and corresponding public health problems are well-known, and disparities across socioeconomic groups are frequently reported. However, the literature is less clear on whether the increasing trends are specific to certain socioeconomic groups and whether disparities in...