Author Archives: Janelle Armstrong-Brown, Jamie Humphrey, and Leah Sussman

About Janelle Armstrong-Brown, Jamie Humphrey, and Leah Sussman

Jamie Humphrey is a Health Geographer in RTI International’s Center for Health Analytics, Media, and Policy. She is also a Research Associate in Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health. She has more than 10 years of experience using interdisciplinary quantitative methods to conduct innovative public health research. Using foundations from health geography as well as social and spatial epidemiological, her research is focused on neighborhoods and health and the intersection of social and environmental impacts on health and well-being in urban communities. She has published on topics including, neighborhoods and child/adolescent health, measurement and identification of neighborhoods; the role of mobility in exposure to socioeconomic contexts; the intersection of indoor air quality, lung function, and socioeconomic status; climate change and indoor air quality; and the moderating impact of community-level violence on the air pollution-cardiovascular disease relationship.

The Long Arm of Redlining: Health Inequities in the Digital Divide

Medical care is sometimes, though not on this blog, viewed as the gold standard to address inequities. However, access to medical care only accounts for an estimated 10-20% of the modifiable factors that affect population health. The other 80-90% of modifiable factors are often referred to as social determinants of health (SDOH). These are the… Read More »

Imputing Race & Ethnicity: Part 2

By | August 26, 2021

Part 1 of this two-part series laid out arguments for and shortcomings of imputing race/ethnicity from the perspective of health equity. In this post, we’ll talk about gaps in the evidence and a few alternatives to imputation, including approaches involving population-level and neighborhood-level data. Imputation is a common solution to deal with “the missing-data problem.”… Read More »

Imputing Race & Ethnicity: Part 1

In Part 1 of this two-part series (originally published Aug. 19, 2021), we lay out arguments for and shortcomings of imputing race/ethnicity from the perspective of health equity. In Part 2, we’ll talk about evidence gaps and research needed, as well as a few alternative approaches. The Biden administration is focusing on health equity and… Read More »