Examining How Inequality Affects Health Outcomes
From the 2018 edition of Healthviews
Examining How Inequality Affects Health Outcomes Heading link
Sage Kim, PhD is an associate professor of health policy and administration whose primary research area looks at the effect of mass incarceration and surveillance on neighborhood social, economic, and health outcomes. Her research focuses on social and spatial processes that shape neighborhood context, which ultimately contribute to health inequality.
Kim collaborates with multi-disciplinary scholars on neighborhood effects on crime, delinquency, and incarceration in relation to social exclusion, labor market outcomes, and health. She interviewed women in jail and followed them back into the community exploring their social, economic, and health conditions. She also completed her study with former inmates released from jails and prisons examining barriers and facilitators for adherence to HIV care. She also collaborated with Community Outreach Intervention Projects (COIP) on a project called “Seek, Test, and Treat,” which implemented opt-out HIV test at intake in corrections. She and her colleagues are working on multiple manuscripts with these data. During Summer 2018, Kim and her colleagues analyzed the Chicago Police Department (CPD) gang database and Strategic Subject List (SSL), looking at the spatial clusters and racial disparity in CPD surveillance practices. Two reports from this analysis are available.
One of her new papers, entitled “Gendered and Racialized Social Expectations, Barriers, and Delayed Breast Cancer Diagnosis,” was published in the journal Cancer in the Fall of 2018 and was selected as a featured paper. This paper examines how racialized ideal gender images affect minority women’s healthcare utilization. As a member of the University of Illinois Cancer Center (UICC), she collaborates with multi-disciplinary scholars on projects that aim to explore how social experiences may affect the genes and biological responses. For example, Kim is a Co-I on a project examining racial differences in neighborhood exposure and colorectal cancer. In June, Kim submitted an R21 on residential mobility and cancer risk using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data. She is currently working with a team of scholars from urban planning, geography, and cancer researchers on an R01 application to explore multi-level spatio-temporal dynamics of neighborhood exposures on cancer survivorship outcomes. Kim is also working on another grant proposal that aims to examine neighborhood conditions and racial disparity in lung cancer gene methylation patterns.
Additionally, Kim works with the Center for Health Equity Research (CHER) to develop health equity research agenda and to train researchers to address equity issues. She is currently writing an evaluation paper looking at processes and challenges of building a multi-disciplinary center such as CHER.