© 2007 American Public Health Association DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2005.071472
Kathleen A. Cagney is with the Departments of Health Studies and Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. Christopher R. Browning is with the Department of Sociology, Ohio State University, Columbus. Danielle M. Wallace is with the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago. Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Kathleen A. Cagney, Department of Health Studies, The University of Chicago, 5841 South Maryland Ave., MC 2007, Chicago, IL 60637 (e-mail: k-cagney{at}uchicago.edu).
Objectives. Evidence indicates that foreign-born Latinos have a health advantage compared with US-born persons of the same socioeconomic status. An explanation for this paradox has remained elusive. We examined the extent to which this paradox exists for the prevalence of asthma and other respiratory conditions. We then explored the role of neighborhood social context in understanding any observed advantage. We invoked theories of social organization, collective efficacy, and the urban ethnic enclave. Methods. We combined data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods Community Survey with 2 other data sources and used hierarchical generalized linear modeling techniques. Results. We found a distinctly graded effect for asthma and other breathing problems among foreign-born Latinos, depending on community composition. Foreign-born Latinos embedded in a neighborhood that had a high percentage of foreign-born residents experienced a significantly lower prevalence of asthma and other breathing problems; those in communities that had a low percentage of foreign-born residents had the highest prevalence overall (even when compared with African Americans). Conclusions. Foreign-born Latinos have a respiratory health advantage only in enclave-like settings. Contexts such as these may provide the cohesiveness critical for effective prevention.
Racial and ethnic disparities in health status continue to cause concern prompting numerous efforts in clinical practice and policy to enhance access to care, increase adherence to treatment regimes, and improve health habits. One anomaly in the disparities literature is the oft-documented "Latino Paradox." Also described as the Hispanic or Epidemiological Paradox, these terms refer to the relatively good health and longer life span of foreign-born Latinos when expectations (in most analyses, primarily based on their socioeconomic status) suggest far greater morbidity and mortality than observed. The paradox has been documented for several health outcomes, including all-cause mortality, infant mortality, and functional status.13 Recent work indicates that the mortality paradox may be the result of return migration effects, at least for those of Mexican origin.4 Evidence related to morbidity, however, continues to indicate a health advantage for foreign-born Latinos when compared with their US-born counterparts.5 In addition to migration and associated data artifact explanations, social and cultural capital (i.e., community-level social cohesiveness, norms, and practices) have been hypothesized as mechanisms responsible for the relatively beneficial health trajectories of Latino immigrants.4,6 High levels of social capital may affect the communitys potential to encourage positive health habits or sanction negative ones. This hypothesized health behavior pathway, however, does not address larger forces that operate at the neighborhood level. Neighborhood-level influences, such as the availability of social support or the accessibility and quality of public parks, may have independent effects on health. Moreover, community characteristics may condition any Latino advantage; that is, foreign-born Latinos may benefit from being embedded in immigrant-dominated and potentially more supportive contexts.7 By contrast, foreign-born Latinos living in communities without a strong immigrant presence may be at a disadvantage. Knowledge of the comparative morbidity experience of US-born and foreign-born Latinos is limited,7 as is understanding of the role of community context in shaping their health. Asthma, in particular, remains relatively understudied in the Latino population.812 The prevalence of asthma appears to vary across small areas and to be affected by neighborhood characteristics13; attention to social context is important to understanding the prevalence of asthma in population subgroups.14 The urban ethnic enclave provides a rich example of the form of community social context where networks are dense and the transmission of health-enhancing information is likely great. We examine the extent to which the Latino Paradox exists for asthma and other respiratory conditions. We then extend previous research by moving beyond individual-level predictors to examine the social context in which these conditions take root. We employed theories of social organization, collective efficacy,15,16 immigrant adaptation, and the urban ethnic enclave1719 to understand how neighborhood social context contributes to asthma and other respiratory conditions, by Latino foreign-born status. Social organization and collective efficacy theories enabled us to draw out components of community life that could be important both to the prevalence of respiratory conditions and to the social organizational features of the ethnic enclave. Structural features of the neighborhood (e.g., residential stability, ethnic heterogeneity, and economic status) set the stage for neighborhood social processes to emerge. These social processescollective efficacy and social network interaction and social exchangemay have independent effects on health.20 Collective efficacy captures the level of trust and attachment in the neighborhood that can be drawn on for mutually beneficial action (i.e., the ability of the community to come together for the common good). For example, neighbors may take responsibility for maintaining safe streets and parks; residents are then drawn outdoors where they get exercise and fresh air. Neighbors do so because "its what we do in our community," rather than because it directly benefits someone they know. Social interaction and social exchange, by contrast, capture the breadth of potentially health-protective social support within a community, and these measures speak to direct social interaction. For example, sharing health information or driving a neighbor to the doctor are the types of instrumental activities that result from dense network connections. Our aim in applying these theoretical frameworks was to introduce a conceptualization of the enclave experience that is congruent with previous work but adds an emphasis on neighborhood-level social processes. The interdependence of individual and community characteristics may largely explain the Latino paradox: the relative health advantage of foreign-born Latinos may be contingent on features of their residential context.
Data and Measures To address our hypotheses we combined 3 data sources from the 1990s that provide individual-level outcomes nested in neighborhoods, as well as measures that capture individual- and neighborhood-level phenomena: (1) the Metropolitan Chicago Information Center Metro Survey (MCIC-MS), (2) the Decennial Census, and (3) the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods Community Survey (PHDCN-CS). MCIC-MS. The MCIC-MS included a serial cross-section of adults aged 18 years and older who resided in the 6-county metropolitan Chicago area (on average, 3000 respondents per wave). To create the individual-level component of our final analytic data set, we pooled the City of Chicago subsample of the 1995, 1997, and 1999 waves of the MCIC-MS (n=3191). The outcome measure and individual-level covariates were derived from these data. The outcome measure was a dichotomous measure derived from the question, has a doctor ever told you that you have asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, or other breathing problems? Evidence indicated that this form of self-reported health status question is both reliable and valid.21 Although this question does not measure the presence of any 1 of these conditions individually, it does provide a comprehensive assessment of respiratory disorders. Prevalence data from the City of Chicago suggested that most of these cases may be asthma, but we note that our outcome measure was meant to capture breathing disorders beyond asthma.22,23 The individual-level covariates derived from the MCIC-MS included age, gender, race/ethnicity, marital status, income, education, home ownership, regular source of care, insurance status, current smoking behavior, and a physician-indicated weight problem. We compared Whites, Blacks, and Latinos born in and outside the United States. We chose to exclude those who identified as Puerto Rican (n=110). Although Puerto Ricans share a language and some common cultural elements with the Latinos in our sample, they are US citizens. Thus, migration patterns between the continental United States and Puerto Rico are more fluid. The unique status of Puerto Ricans renders comparisons difficult under the Latino paradox rubric. Decennial Census. Census data made it possible for us to construct measures of neighborhood socioeconomic structure and composition. Three of the 5 neighborhood-level measures came from these data. The first measure was a residential stability factor score that included the percentage of residents living in the same house since 1985 and the percentage of owner-occupied dwellings. The second measure was the logged value of a concentrated poverty factor score, which included the percentage of female-headed households, unemployed residents, and residents living below the poverty line or receiving public assistance. The third measure was the logged value of the percentage of foreign-born residents in the neighborhood. PHDCN-CS. The sampling design of the PHDCN-CS relied on 1990 US Census data for Chicago to identify 343 neighborhood clustersgroups of 2 to 3 census tracts that contain approximately 8000 people. Major geographic boundaries (e.g., railroad tracks, parks, freeways), knowledge of Chicagos local neighborhoods, and cluster analyses of census data guided the construction of neighborhood clusters so that they were relatively homogeneous with respect to racial/ethnic mix, socioeconomic status, housing density, and family structure. Two measures of neighborhood social context were derived from these data. Collective efficacy was operationalized by combining measures of social cohesion and informal social control. Social cohesion was constructed from a cluster of conceptually related items from the PHDCN-CS that measured the respondents level of agreement (on a 5-point scale) with the following statements: (1) People around here are willing to help their neighbors, (2) This is a close-knit neighborhood, (3) People in this neighborhood can be trusted, and (4) People in this neighborhood generally dont get along with each other. Health-related informal social control was determined from the respondents level of agreement with the following statements: (1) If I were sick I could count on my neighbors to shop for groceries for me, and (2) You can count on adults in this neighborhood to watch out that children are safe and dont get in trouble. An additional informal social control item asked respondents how likely it was that people in their neighborhood would intervene if a fight broke out in front of their house. The informal social control items address expectations for beneficial health-related action as well as neighborhood supervision of potentially hazardous conditions or violent situations. The 7 items were combined to form a single scale of health-related collective efficacy. The social interaction and exchange scale measured the frequency of interaction and network-based exchange among neighbors. By contrast to the generalized assessments of trust, solidarity, and shared expectations for informal social control included in the measure of collective efficacy, the social interaction and exchange scale was designed to capture actual ties between neighborhood residents. Respondents were asked, how often do you and people in this neighborhood (1) have parties or other get-togethers where other people in the neighborhood are invited, (2) visit in each others homes or on the street, (3) ask each other advice about personal things such as child rearing or job openings, and (4) do favors for each other?
Analysis
We began by calculating the means and standard deviations that described our study population, the individual-level component of our analysis (Table 1
Finally, Figure 1
Approximately 18% of the MCIC-MS respondents had been told by a physician that they had asthma or other breathing problems. This result is similar to contemporary reports of asthma prevalence in Chicago, where data indicate that physician-diagnosed asthma approaches 20% in some neighborhoods.27 Just under 19% of Whites reported asthma or other breathing problems compared with 22.2% of Blacks, 14.8% of US-born Latinos, and 7.8% of foreign-born Latinos. Asthma also varied by the population composition of the community. Communities with large foreign-born populations reported that 16.3% of residents had asthma and other breathing problems; communities with medium and small foreign-born populations had rates of 16.8% and 22.2%, respectively.
As shown in Table 1
Multilevel results are presented in the 6 models shown in Table 2 Models 3 through 6 illustrate the results from cross-level interactions between neighborhood factors and the foreign-born Latino effect. Model 3 indicated that the percentage of foreign-born residents in the community interacts with individual-level Latino immigrant status. As the percentage of foreign-born residents increased, the protective effect of foreign-born Latino status was enhanced. This effect remained robust with the inclusion of collective efficacy (Model 4), which did not interact significantly with foreign-born status. By contrast, Model 5 indicated that social interaction and exchange significantly increased the protective effect of foreign-born status on the likelihood of asthma and other breathing problems. Finally, Model 6 included both collective efficacy and social interaction and exchange (adding social interaction and exchange to the model for the intercept as well). Collective efficacy remained insignificant, but both the logged percentage of foreign-born residents and social interaction and exchange variables retained their significance.
Figure 1
The relative health advantage of foreign-born Latinos has been observed across age groups, outcomes, and, in some cases, country of origin.2,29,30 Previous research has delineated the individual-level characteristics associated with this health advantage but, to our knowledge, has not examined the neighborhood social context in which these characteristics are embedded nor the interdependence between them. We identified a health benefit from foreign-born Latino status: Latinos born outside the United States experienced appreciably lower rates of asthma and other breathing problems. We found, however, that this benefit observed in the aggregate was heavily dependent on the communities in which foreign-born Latinos reside. When embedded in a neighborhood where the presence of other foreign-born residents is high, the risk of asthma and other breathing problems was abated. Conversely, foreign-born Latinos who lived in communities where there was a low percentage of foreign-born residents experienced the highest rates of asthma and other breathing problems overall. Thus, the Latino advantage with respect to asthma may accrue only when it is socially leveraged. Consistent with the early theoretical and empirical research of urban sociologists Shaw and McKay,15 homogeneity with respect to ethnicity and immigrant status may increase information exchange through a common language. Shared culture or lifestyle behaviors also may be at play.31,32 We found divergent experiences by neighborhood context after the introduction of individual-level behavioral factors associated with asthma and other breathing problems (e.g., smoking, weight problem). Thus, the role of community and cultural supports may not only influence individual-level behaviors but may also affect health in their own right. Collective efficacy, found to be important to asthma rates in previous work,13 was not as important to the health of foreign-born Latinos as was the level of social interaction and exchange. Collective efficacy may operate differently for Latinos or it may not have the immediate or intimate effect that social networks provide.33 Communities that have limited social ties could attenuate the health benefit of immigrant status and offer further evidence that the Latino paradox is context dependent. Importantly, social network interaction and exchange does not explain the effect of percentage foreign born; rather, the effect of both characteristics suggests that neighborhood factors may be additive. A further implication of this finding is that analyses of the health advantage for foreign-born Latinos fail to take into account neighborhood context may substantially underestimate that benefit for immigrants who reside in ethnic enclaves. Future analyses will explore differences by country of origin, given that migration patterns may differ across Chicago neighborhoods. For instance, Latinos who reside in communities that have a low percentage of foreign-born residents may be more vulnerable to asthma and other respiratory conditions. With respect to socioeconomic status, we did not find evidence that foreign-born Latinos who lived in communities with a low percentage of foreign-born residents were more disadvantaged when it comes to basic economic and demographic characteristics. Indeed, if anything, the foreign-born Latinos in communities of fewer foreign-born residents were more advantaged than were their counterparts in communities that had a higher percentage of foreign-born residents. The characteristics we considered may omit an important predictor of asthma and other breathing problems, but the overall profile suggests comparability or marginal advantage for foreign-born Latinos in communities of fewer foreign-born residents. On a related note, most Latinos in Chicago are Mexican (70.4%),34 so another extension of this work will focus on the asthma experience among Mexicans. Preliminary analyses of these data indicate that results from the Mexican sub-sample are consistent with those for all Latinos (results available from first author on request). Finally, additional analyses will incorporate alternative assessments of community, including constructs to assess specific characteristics of ethnic enclaves. Some caveats merit consideration. First, our outcome was a composite measure of respiratory conditions. Asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, and other breathing disorders differ in etiology, so they also may differ in the extent to which they are affected by neighborhood factors; the role of neighborhood in the onset or trajectory of these respiratory conditions could vary in important ways. Future data collection efforts would benefit from a decomposition of these conditions so that neighborhood structural and social process measures could be examined for each. Second, reports of respiratory conditions are contingent upon a clinicians evaluation. Even though we controlled for regular source of care in our models, this type of question may disproportionately underestimate the prevalence of asthma for those whose interaction with the medical care system is intermittent. Third, our study was confined to the City of Chicago, so the ability to generalize is limited. Analyses from other urban centers that have prominent Latino enclaves would allow for a richer understanding of the enclave experience and, depending upon availability of data, could address the independent mechanisms relevant for a host of respiratory conditions. The Latino population is the fastest growing and largest population subgroup in the United States.35 Attention to the context in which Latinos reside could provide important insights into trajectories of acute and chronic conditions. The divergent experience of foreign-born Latinos illustrates that community is critical to shaping health. Research of this form contributes to our understanding of social capital and the extent to which it aids in ameliorating threats to respiratory health and, potentially, to other conditions. Knowledge of the community and its characteristics may provide the foundation for initiatives meant to disseminate information and address concerns about prevention, possible triggers, and treatment of asthma and other respiratory conditions.
Support for this research was provided by the National Institute on Aging and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (grant R01AG022488). We thank Robert Sampson, Felton Earls, and members of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods for providing access to the community survey, and the Metropolitan Chicago Information Center for access to the metro survey. We also thank David Meltzer for comments on an earlier version of this article and Sandra Thomas for her expertise in describing Chicagos asthma prevalence.
Human Participant Protection
Peer Reviewed
Contributors Accepted for publication May 12, 2006.
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