Cumulative Disadvantage and Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health at Midlife

Dana Garbarski, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Previous research has focused on accounting for various health-relevant factors to explain racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes. However, it is often unclear whether the disparities in health outcomes are due to differences across racial and ethnic groups in the composition of health-relevant factors or differences by race and ethnicity in the association between health-relevant factors and health outcomes. Using data from the over-40 health module of the NLSY 1979 cohort, this study uses regression decomposition techniques to delineate the contribution of each of these components in explaining racial and ethnic disparities in summary measures of mental and physical health for women and men. The analysis finds varying support for three different cumulative disadvantage mechanisms producing racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes at midlife: status-resource interaction, cumulative exposure, and path-dependent early life exposure.