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Racial Disparities in US Infant Birth Outcomes: A Protective Effect of Military Affiliation?

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Abstract

Research has been unable to determine why African Americans have higher infant mortality and preterm birth prevalence than whites, even taking into account measurable social and economic differences. This is, in part, due to the difficulty of adequately measuring the impacts of racial inequality and residential segregation. As an alternative approach, this paper comparatively examines infant outcomes among military-affiliated and civilian black and white women. The military setting provides higher-than-average economic equality and universal healthcare access. Although military-affiliated populations are usually left out of most major datasets, we construct a new variable that allows us to identify military affiliation using the CDC’s PRAMS survey data. Multinomial logistic regression analyses show that there is a negative association between adverse birth outcomes and military affiliation for both white and black women. Thus, the black-white infant mortality gap persists in the military even though black affiliates experience significant improvement in outcomes relative to their same-race civilian counterparts. Nevertheless, the black-white disparity among military-affiliated women is somewhat lessened compared to the black-white civilian disparity.

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Notes

  1. Although the convention is to omit the largest reference group, in this case White civilian women, we instead omit Black military women in order to show explicit comparisons across our main groups of interest. (We also reran models with each of other subgroups as omitted categories in separate analyses to verify significant differences).

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge grant funding from NSF (SES-0751505). Jennifer Lundquist is the PI on this grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR), University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Jennifer Lundquist

  2. University of Pennsylvania’s Population Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Irma Elo

  3. CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Wanda Barfield

  4. Renmin University of China , Beijing, China

    Zhun Xu

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  1. Jennifer Lundquist
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  2. Irma Elo
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  4. Zhun Xu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jennifer Lundquist.

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Table 4 Independent variable measurements
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Lundquist, J., Elo, I., Barfield, W. et al. Racial Disparities in US Infant Birth Outcomes: A Protective Effect of Military Affiliation?. Race Soc Probl 6, 161–180 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-013-9108-8

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