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Racial Isolation and Chlamydia Rates in US Counties

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Abstract

Using a hypersegregation framework, this paper examines the relationship between racial isolation (i.e., segregation) and chlamydia rates in counties of different racial compositions. A series of “race-of-county”-stratified regression models estimate chlamydia rates with black isolation and white isolation, net of (i.e., controlling for) region, college graduation rates, sex ratios, unemployment rates, median income, population density, and income inequality. The results show that in white counties, both black isolation and white isolation are associated with decreases in chlamydia rates. In integrated and disproportionately black counties, black isolation is associated with higher rates of chlamydia, but white isolation is associated with lower rates of chlamydia. These findings suggest that the relationship of residential segregation to chlamydia rates differs when it is due to white isolation versus black isolation, and the effects of black isolation within disproportionately black counties are not equivalent to black isolation in white counties because the levels of concentrated disadvantage are not similar.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Assata Zerai, Ruby Mendenhall, Tim Liao, and Jorge Chapa for their substantial contributions to this paper. I would also like to thank Christine Mair, Cedric Herring, Hayward Horton, Michael Hughes, Thomas LaVeist, Chiquita Collins, and Yan Xing for their comments and suggestions on various drafts. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers at Race and Social Problems who made constructive suggestions that strengthened the paper. Finally, I am grateful to those who provided comments at colloquia at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Parts of this paper have been presented at the Association of Black Sociologists annual conference.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Loren Henderson

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  1. Loren Henderson
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Correspondence to Loren Henderson.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 List of variables and sources used in the analysis
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Henderson, L. Racial Isolation and Chlamydia Rates in US Counties. Race Soc Probl 7, 111–122 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-015-9143-8

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