four - Literature on health inequalities

Summary

The chapters in Part 2 are structured such that, initially, they offer an insight as to what the scholarship in focus assumes about their respective topics; after that the results of my theorising exercise are presented to shed light on what the context of the ‘discovery’ divulges (Abbott, 2012; Swedberg, 2012a, 2012b). Worth noting is that this approach is for the benefit of both ethnicity scholars wanting to become acquainted with the nexus in question and for social gerontologists who work on this nexus or want to embark on studies about it. The sections with italicised sub-headings offer detailed information about specific themes for scholars already specialising in one of these areas of research.

As mentioned in the Introduction, the theorising exercise that this book engages in utilises a scoping review of scholarship on the intersection of ethnicity and old age in order to gain insight into the understandings of ethnicity that inform this scholarship. This chapter aims specifically to describe what characterises the portion of this scholarship that focuses on health inequalities (n=117) and has been published during the 20-year period in focus here (see Appendix for details on how the scoping review was conducted). In order to grasp the state of affairs of research before the period in question begins I will give the reader insight into what handbooks, encyclopaedias and edited collections on the intersection of ethnicity and old age describe as givens as far as health inequalities, ethnicity and old age are concerned. It is worth noting that all of these publications are based on US findings, since interest in the intersection of ethnicity and old age as it pertains to health inequalities in other parts of the world seems to have emerged much later (as the coding of the articles conducted while working on the scoping review shows).

One of the things that was often pointed out in the early 1990s in US publications is that older people with minority ethnic/racial backgrounds tend to have poorer health than their majority ethnic counterparts (Gelfand, 2003). This is probably one of the reasons why the topic of health inequalities is the one that has received the most attention during the period covered by the scoping review to be presented in the sections that follow.