I n this issue BRAUN et al. [1] make a plea for an international workshop to review aspects of race and ethnicity in relation to lung function. This is a timely initiative, as many people struggle in epidemiological and genetic studies, and in clinical practice, with the interpretation of test results in an increasingly multi-ethnic society [2]. Our notions of race derive from Blumenbach, who d...

To the Editor—Racial and ethnic differences in health and disease are real. For example, in the field of neurology, intracranial stenoses are more common among the Chinese population, and multiple sclerosis is uncommon, when compared with whites from Europe and North America. Studying various subgroups is important to detect different patterns of disease and to obtain aetiological clues; race a...

Medicare's databases provide a rich source of information about the program's 43 million beneficiaries. These data have played an important role in documenting racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health and health care. Because they derive largely from administrative records that have been collected over many years using varying standards, however, they are not fully adequate for m...

Racial/ethnic minority women who come to identify as lesbian must confront the norms and expectations of both the majority and minority cultures in which they live. This article reports findings from a diverse sample of nearly 450 women and examines the effects of race/ethnicity on sexual identity development in African American, Latina, and White lesbians. African American and Latina responden...

We investigated the association between a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 applicant's self-identified race or ethnicity and the probability of receiving an award by using data from the NIH IMPAC II grant database, the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, and other sources. Although proposals with strong priority scores were equally likely to be funded regardless of race, we find that As...

Robert Hummer and Erin Hamilton note that the prevalence of fragile families varies substantially by race and ethnicity. African Americans and Hispanics have the highest prevalence; Asian Americans, the lowest; and whites fall somewhere in the middle. The share of unmarried births is lower among most foreign-born mothers than among their U.S.-born ethnic counterparts. Immigrant-native differenc...

This paper examines how high cost mortgage lending varies by race and ethnicity. It uses a unique panel data that matches a representative sample of mortgages in seven large metropolitan markets between 2004 and 2008 to public records of housing transactions and proprietary credit reporting data. The results reveal a significantly higher incidence of high costs loans for African-American and Hi...

In a recent study by Ginther et al., the probability of receiving a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) RO1 award was related to the applicant’s race/ethnicity. The results indicate black/African-American applicants were 10% less likely than white peers to receive an award, after controlling for background and qualifications. It has generated a widespread debate regarding the unfairness of...

Objective. Although an expanding literature on “stratification beliefs” has developed over the past three decades, research has neglected relationships between religion and beliefs about poverty and other inequalities. This study examines the relationship between religious affiliation and “individualistic,” “structuralist,” and “fatalistic” beliefs about the causes of poverty, and compares the ...