Racial discrimination and health: My Body, My Story – as told by explicit and implicit measures of exposure, in context

To date, most research on racial discrimination and health has relied on self-report exposure data – which necessarily reflect only what people are willing and/or able to say, and thus may not capture the health impact of internalizing racial discrimination. Building on our pilot work with the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure exposure to racial discrimination, we used the IAT along with two explicit self-report measures (“Experiences of Discrimination” [EOD]; “Everyday Discrimination Scale” [EDS]), in our newly established study: My Body, My Story. Participants include 526 self-identified US-born black non-Hispanic Americans and 509 self-identified US-born white non-Hispanic Americans, age 35-64, who at the time of recruitment (August 2008 – December 2010) were members of diverse community health centers in Boston, MA. Among the 1229 eligible members reached, 94% agreed to participate (black: 97%; white: 91%), of whom the majority were women, had a high school but not college degree, and had household incomes below $48,000/year. Among the black and white participants, self-reported exposure respectively equaled: (a) for 3+ situations of racial discrimination (ever), 64% and 18% (EOD), and (b) for unfair treatment based on race/ethnicity (in last year), 19% and 4% (EDS). In this presentation, we examine: (1) the distribution of the explicit and implicit measures of discrimination in relation to race/ethnicity, socioeconomic position, gender, age, and both explicit and implicit measures of racial identity, (2) the association of the discrimination measures with each other and with selected chronic disease health outcomes, and (3) interaction effects among the measures.