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Ethnoracial Disparities in Self-Rated Health: Exploring the Impact of Skin Color and Other Ethnoracial Characteristics in Mexico

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Abstract

Objectives

This manuscript aims to understand the association between self-rated health and ethnic-racial characteristics (i.e., skin color, self-ascription, and Indigenous language) in the context of the Mexican population.

Design

Logistic regression analyses, using the 2019 PRODER (N = 7187)—a representative survey at the national level. We centered the analysis on two measures of skin color: the interviewer assessment of color skin (that has been used in previous studies), and the ITA scale, a measure constructed from optical digital colorimeter readings (a novel method in ethnoraciality studies in Mexico, included in the PRODER survey).

Results

In comparison to the interviewer’s assessment of skin color, the ITA score shows a significant association with self-rated health, even in the presence of individual conditions, sociodemographic traits, and life-course events. In contrast, ethnic-racial self-ascriptions and speaking of an Indigenous language do not show any statistical associations.

Conclusion

Contrary to previous research, our results suggest a positive association between skin color and self-rated health, when the former is assessed with the colorimeter readings; it means that those with lighter color skin are more prone to report a better health perception. It has methodological implications in the way skin color is observed.

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Data Availability

Data are available at https://discriminacion.colmex.mx/?page_id=4655.

Notes

  1. The PERLA palette was developed by Telles and Martínez Casas [34] in the context of the PERLA study. One of its purposes was the measurement of skin tone in the Latin American countries. However, considering the ample ethnic and skin tone diversity in the region, it included a wide spectrum of colors that do not completely match those found in the Mexican population. In sum, the PRODER palette is a more accurate representation of the skin-tone variability in Mexico than the PERLA color palette [17].

  2. In previous research (see, e.g., [14]), color clustering has been used to avoid nonlinearities in the association of skin color with health. For this reason and to allow comparability, we grouped the interviewer’s color assessment variable into (approximately) quintiles.

  3. The 2019 PRODER survey uses EDS and MDS scales in their dichotomized form, where respondents indicate whether they have lived the mentioned experienced or not [38].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. División de Administración Pública, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico City, Mexico

    Javier Reyes-Martínez

  2. El Colegio de México y Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico

    Iván Alcántara Santoyo

  3. El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Patricio Solís

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  1. Javier Reyes-Martínez
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  3. Patricio Solís
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Javier Reyes-Martínez, Iván Alcántara, and Patricio Solís. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Javier Reyes-Martínez and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Javier Reyes-Martínez.

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Reyes-Martínez, J., Santoyo, I.A. & Solís, P. Ethnoracial Disparities in Self-Rated Health: Exploring the Impact of Skin Color and Other Ethnoracial Characteristics in Mexico. J. Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-024-02002-3

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