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INTRODUCTION: Social determinants are structures and conditions in the biological, physical, built, and social environments that affect health, social and physical functioning, health risk, quality of life, and health outcomes. The adoption of recommended, standard measurement protocols for social determinants of health will advance the science of minority health and health disparities research and provide standard social determinants of health protocols for inclusion in all studies with human participants. METHODS: A PhenX (consensus measures for Phenotypes and eXposures) Working Group of social determinants of health experts was convened from October 2018 to May 2020 and followed a well-established consensus process to identify and recommend social determinants of health measurement protocols. The PhenX Toolkit contains data collection protocols suitable for inclusion in a wide range of research studies. The recommended social determinants of health protocols were shared with the broader scientific community to invite review and feedback before being added to the Toolkit. RESULTS: Nineteen social determinants of health protocols were released in the PhenX Toolkit (https://www.phenxtoolkit.org) in May 2020 to provide measures at the individual and structural levels for built and natural environments, structural racism, economic resources, employment status, occupational health and safety, education, environmental exposures, food environment, health and health care, and sociocultural community context. CONCLUSIONS: Promoting the adoption of well-established social determinants of health protocols can enable consistent data collection and facilitate comparing and combining studies, with the potential to increase their scientific impact.

Higher rates of black mortality compared to whites in the United States are longstanding and well documented. Wide variation across racial and socioeconomic groups suggests that many deaths may be preventable. We hypothesize that higher mortality for African Americans is due to the fundamental causes of structural racism and poverty. We developed a new index, the Racial Isolation of Poverty (RIP), to examine how the race/class nexus of disadvantage is associated with higher rates of mortality for African Americans. A wide range of policies has isolated black people into areas with poorer-quality schools and fewer jobs, where over-policing substitutes for community resources. Geographic isolation by race and income has enabled sub-standard resource distribution to African Americans. Geographic isolation also allowed us to measure the effects of racism in US counties. Two main effects, Racial Isolation (RI), and the interaction of RI with economic deprivation, or RIP, were tested in a cross-sectional fixed-effects model. Both RIP and RI increased mortality for blacks while only RIP increased mortality for whites. Universal policies to promote economic security for all and reparations especially designed to promote economic security and wealth for African Americans are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent article [Vinkovic D, Kirman A (2006) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 103:19261?19265] showing that the Schelling model has a physical analogue extends our understanding of the model. However, prior research has already outlined a mathematical basis for the Schelling model and simulations based on it have already enhanced our understanding of the social dynamics that underlie the model, something that the physical analogue does not address. Research in social science has provided a formal basis for the segregative outcomes resulting from the residential selection process and simulations have replicated relevant spatial outcomes under different specifications of the residential dynamics. New and increasingly detailed survey data on preferences demonstrates the embeddedness of the Schelling selection process in the social behaviors of choosing alternative residential compositions. It also demonstrates that, in the multicultural context, seemingly mild preferences for living with similar neighbors carry the potential to be strong determinants for own race selectivity and residential segregation.