Literature on health inequalities

Abstract

This chapter aims specifically to describe what characterises the portion of the scholarship on the intersection of ethnicity/ race and ageing/ old age that focuses on health inequalities. This chapter brings attention to the fact that this literature regards ethnicity and race as crude proxies and fails therefore to acknowledge the complexity embedded in these social positions. The chapter brings attention to the main trends observed when reviewing the literature (i.e. that most studies come from North America and focus on a small number of ethnic minorities, most fail to address how ethnicity and race is made sense of in the studies, most are informed by the essentialist and/ or structuralist perspectives, and that most studies rely on studies that have not been designed to specifically explore the nexus in question). In doing so, this chapter shows what the perspectives that inform this literature mean not only for the themes that have received attention (i.e. general health/ physical functioning, disability and mobility/ disease-specific/ mental health/ cognitive functioning), but also for the ones that remain unexplored (such as, for example, the study of how perceived racism impacts the health of older ethnic minorities).