Postdoc Fellow
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
Developing a Racialized Legal Status Stress Scale Among Latino Immigrants to Understand Health DisparitiesDespite living longer than White individuals, Latino individuals exhibit greater health risks and decline in functional status as they age. Unequal stress exposure is an established contributor to health disparities, but the structurally embedded stressors experienced by Latino immigrants due to their social position, at the intersection of race and ethnicity and legal status, have yet to be systematically assessed.
To address this gap, Dr. Zajdel’s team will create and validate a racialized legal status stress (RLSS) scale that captures burdens related to being racialized as Latino, including being assumed to be criminals or undocumented immigrants. The study hypothesizes that greater perceived frequency and appraisal of racialized legal status stress will be associated with psychological distress and physical health.
In this project, Dr. Zajdel’s team will:
- Develop an item pool for the RLSS scale based on a comprehensive literature review.
- Ensure scale items are interpreted as intended through a series of cognitive interviews with 20 Latino adult immigrants.
- Begin to assess the psychometric properties of the RLSS scale and its relationship to demographic characteristics and health through an online survey.
Development of the RLSS scale will allow researchers to test racialized legal status as an underlying mechanism eroding the health of Latino immigrants. This scale will promote the assessment of structural determinants of health and add to the nascent body of intersectional analytic tools. As such, Dr. Zajdel’s team will advance the quantitative study of health disparities beyond consideration of unequal outcomes alone and towards identification of the processes driving intersectional inequities.
