US research agendas have often been oriented to demographic inquiries of race and health, treating race as a presumed characteristic of individuals and predictive of a range of health outcomes. Without consideration of racialization as a process, and structural racism as embedded in social structures beyond individuals, these approaches have been limited in their ability to examine context, lived experience, interactional processes, and unpacking apparent paradoxes in results. Studies of structural racism, as opposed to individual race, are on the rise but still comprise only a microcosm of all research being done on racialized injustice and health. Furthermore, studies using qualitative methods constitute only about 2% of the work being done on racialized injustice—even in a field such as sociology, which should be well‐positioned to understand how structural racism affects health. We illustrate how strengths of qualitative methods, focused on complexity, process, contextualization, and meaning‐making, are a necessary component of research on structural racism if that work is to be successful in understanding and dismantling racialized health injustice.

中文翻译：

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定性方法对于理解种族不公正与健康的重要性


美国的研究议程通常面向种族和健康的人口统计调查，将种族视为个人的假定特征并预测一系列健康结果。如果不考虑种族化作为一个过程，以及嵌入个人之外的社会结构中的结构性种族主义，这些方法在检查背景、生活经验、互动过程和解开结果中明显悖论的能力方面受到限制。与个人种族相反，对结构性种族主义的研究正在兴起，但仍然只是所有关于种族不公正和健康的研究的一个缩影。此外，使用定性方法的研究仅占针对种族不公正的研究的约 2%——即使是在社会学这样的领域，社会学应该能够很好地理解结构性种族主义如何影响健康。我们阐释了关注复杂性、过程、情境化和意义建构的定性方法的优势如何成为结构性种族主义研究的必要组成部分，如果这项工作要成功地理解和消除种族化的健康不公正现象。