文章基本信息

标题：Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in Residential Proximity to Polluting Industrial Facilities: Evidence From the Americans' Changing Lives Study
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作者：Paul Mohai ; Paula M. Lantz ; Jeffrey Morenoff 等
期刊名称：American journal of public health
印刷版ISSN：0090-0036
出版年度：2009
卷号：99
期号：Suppl 3
页码：S649-S656
DOI：10.2105/AJPH.2007.131383
语种：English
出版社：American Public Health Association
摘要：Objectives. We sought to demonstrate the advantages of using individual-level survey data in quantitative environmental justice analyses and to provide new evidence regarding racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of polluting industrial facilities. Methods. Addresses of respondents in the baseline sample of the Americans' Changing Lives Study and polluting industrial facilities in the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory were geocoded, allowing assessments of distances between respondents' homes and polluting facilities. The associations between race and other sociodemographic characteristics and living within 1 mile (1.6 km) of a polluting facility were estimated via logistic regression. Results. Blacks and respondents at lower educational levels and, to a lesser degree, lower income levels were significantly more likely to live within a mile of a polluting facility. Racial disparities were especially pronounced in metropolitan areas of the Midwest and West and in suburban areas of the South. Conclusions. Our results add to the historical record demonstrating significant disparities in exposures to environmental hazards in the US population and provide a paradigm for studying changes over time in links to health. Concerns about the health effects of the disproportionate exposure to environmental burdens have been a major driving force in mobilizing minority communities into a national environmental justice movement.^{1 , 2} More and more research suggests racial and socioeconomic disparities in exposure to environmental hazards,^{3 – 6} but nearly all of the studies in this area have yielded only indirect evidence, describing the demographic composition of areas and their proximity to hazardous sites.^{7 – 19} In this “spatial coincidence”²⁰ or “unit-hazard coincidence”²¹ methodology, predefined geographic units of analysis (such as census tracts or zip code areas) that do or do not contain a hazard of interest are selected and then the demographic characteristics of host and nonhost units are compared.^{21 – 23} One limitation of this approach is that it assumes that people living in host units containing the hazard under investigation live closer to it than do those living in nonhost units, which is not necessarily the case.²¹ Another limitation is the great variability in the size of the units. For example, the smallest tract containing a hazardous waste facility is less than 0.1 square mile (0.26 km²), whereas the largest is more than 7500 square miles (19 500 km²).²¹ Distance-based methods overcome these limitations by assessing the precise distance between the location of environmental hazards and the individuals or places under study. In 1 study, the proportions of minority and poor individuals living in the units within the 1-, 2-, or 3-mile (1.6-, 3.2-, or 4.8-km) buffer zones around hazardous facilities were much greater than the proportions observed when only the host units were considered,^{21 , 23} and meta-analyses have shown that studies in which geographic information system (i.e., distance-based) methods are used reveal greater racial and socioeconomic disparities in proximity to environmental hazards than do studies in which the conventional (i.e., unit-hazard coincidence) method is used.⁶ Although distance-based studies are not as prevalent as conventional unit-hazard coincidence studies, they are increasing in frequency.^{12 , 20 – 26} However, researchers applying distance-based methods to census and other predefined geographic units still must address the problem that many units are only partially captured by buffers, and there is no single standard for determining whether or how to categorize a partially captured unit as within or outside a buffer. An alternative to the research designs just discussed, both of which rely heavily on census geography to define analytic units, is to use survey data to examine individual-level racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in residential proximity to hazardous sites. This strategy has several advantages. First, survey respondents can be represented as geographic points, leaving little ambiguity in determining whether they are located within specified distances of hazardous sites. Second, using individual-level data avoids the ecological fallacy of incorrectly assuming that relationships among geographic units translate to relationships at the micro- or individual level. Third, survey data afford more-extensive and -detailed information about the life circumstances of people living near hazardous sites than are available from the short and long forms of the decennial census. This allows better adjustments for confounding and offers additional insight about the characteristics of those living near environmental hazards. Finally, longitudinal survey data provide unique opportunities to examine how living near hazardous sites is related over time to racial and socioeconomic differences in future health and mortality. Only a few localized studies have used survey data to assess environmental inequalities, and they generally confirm the presence of social disparities in proximity to environmental hazards.^{5 , 27} In this study, in which we used survey data from a representative probability sample of the American population linked with national data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), we conducted the first national-level analysis, to our knowledge, of social inequalities in the distribution of polluting industrial facilities employing individual-level survey data. Our goals were to demonstrate the advantages of using survey data over traditional census data approaches in conducting environmental inequality analyses and, by contributing to the growing body of evidence pertaining to disparities in environmental exposures, to lay a foundation for future analyses of the role environmental factors play in racial and socioeconomic disparities in health and mortality.