Research Question and Justification
Health equity is a long-standing concern. There is a relative correlation between where people live, their ZIP code, and their length and quality of life. Life expectancy and common health disparities are influenced by certain social factors like race, education, economics, and location, among other social issues. Governmental efforts to address the processes used to administer, finance, and deliver care have consequently failed to bridge the gap of ZIP codes’ impact on human health. Some social circumstances increase or decrease the chances of people accessing quality healthcare. Unearthing the existing disparities in healthcare inequalities in different ZIP codes requires analyzing the convectional regulation and evolution models of current and factual evidence to depict the situation (Sen-Crowe et al. 2021). Although empirical evidence shows various positions on the philosophical understanding of the credibility and approaches showing the healthcare inequalities in different ZIP codes, it is important to research and reconciles the situation with existing literature.
This understanding contributes to the awareness that the implications of access to information include the significance of access to or introduction to various types of public health records on the participation ( e.g., of distinct groups, as well as the implications of health disparity social scope on open support for activities to reduce health disparities (Bi et al. 2020). The acquired knowledge will provide a complete picture of the broad demands of healthcare professionals like myself in expanding the extent of accessibility. These interests have increased my zeal to diminish well-being incongruities evoked by broad government and establishment endeavors for my effective research-driven intercessions.
Every health professional has to accord equal chances and revenge for all members of the community. The encouragement for an individualized encounter in self-awareness on ensuring equity in public health care increases the efforts to enhance societal betterment for everyone. Health equity is the fair opportunity to secure a state of even distribution of health resources and information, gives a better chance to provide the full potential of health (Sen-Crowe et al. 2021). Nobody needs to be impeded from achieving or accessing health equity. Health equity and opportunity are inseparably connected. The learned knowledge and self-awareness evoke an understanding of the heavy burden of disease, and the benefits of well-being are inequitably disseminated. The unjust dispersion is caused by social, natural, financial, and basic variables that shape wellbeing and are themselves conveyed unequally, with articulated contrasts in opportunities for wellbeing.
Literature Review
Health inequity is complicated in the way that policy conceptions aimed at eradicating health disparities for minorities could have resulted in less coordination of restorative care use. Community-wide challenges such as poverty, joblessness, low educational accomplishment, a lack of housing, a lack of affordable transportation, exposure to viciousness, and neighborhood disintegration (social or physical) all influence health and promote differences in well-being (Huyser et al. 2021). However, the aspect of health inequalities is problematic in terms of how policymakers interpret gaps in well-being across socially disadvantaged and advantaged groups. The exposition gives a brief audit of the voluminous literature dwelling on well-being incongruities, with a center on a few major strings counting populaces of intrigued, rate, and predominance of somberness and mortality (Huyser et al. 2021). Determinants of well-being, wellbeing education and well-being data looking for media impacts on well-being incongruities and endeavors to decrease public health inequalities are highlighted.
On this note, populaces of interest tend to be characterized essentially by financial status (income/education), race, ethnicity, and sex or sexual orientation. In any case, the contrast in the sexual introduction, foreigner status, geology, and physical and mental incapacity are moreover of concern (Cummings et al. 2017). The determinants of well-being can be categorized along with several measurements. Still, common assignments consider behavioral, social, and natural variables that lead to healthcare inequalities and contrasts in getting healthcare services.
Various scholars have argued that ZIP codes correlate with the quality of health and life expectancy. Graham (2016) states that the “ZIP code matters more than your genetic code in promoting health outcomes from mother to child in the breastfeeding campaign carried out in various states in the United States”(390). The study established that the lack of proper policies to enhance the equitable distribution of healthcare reduce the capabilities and needs of the underserved population in low socio-economic ZIP codes (Graham 2016). Although adopting digital tools in the healthcare system is a probable solution to reduce the persistent paradigm as a determinant of individual health destiny, identification of different approaches to bridge health inequalities integration of social and clinical factors related to ZIP code distribution of population.
Geographical barriers contribute to many rural residents facing health challenges due to common factors related to the ZIP codes distribution of the population. Common social disparity factors include low educational attainment, poor pharmaceutical products and physicians supply, poverty, and other demographic elements (Cummings et al. 2017). Health risks are more prone due to the rurality tier, where access and quality of care vary with the suitability of infrastructure, SES, and residential financial stability. Social determinants of health on surgical outcomes have adverse effects on populations based on their residential segregation. The lifestyle and behavioral characteristics of any ethnic group dictate the acquisition, management, and development of major chronic diseases.
Health promoters are responsible for ensuring that they account for the attitudes, values, culture, and situations in life to achieve beneficial changes in the healthcare status of the minority population (Cummings et al. 2017). In America, the health status of African Americans or Blacks has long been known to report worse achievements as compared to whites in society. All these efforts have received little attention over the years to improve intervention strategies.
The research on the social impact of ZIP codes on human health checks on the social determinants of the contributors to health status disparities among minority populations, including racism, social injustices, and equitable access to systematic health care facilities that influence ZIP codes distribution of health status. The discrepancies in back American Health concerns date back long before 1906 (Sen-Crowe et al. 2021). In the report, W.E.B DuBois featuring “The Health and Physique of the Negro American,” in his piece, DuBois documented the disparities in the ZIP code’s distribution of health status compared to that of whites in America.
Other information on the minority population health disparities has shown differences in access and quality of health care offered to the American public at affordable and accessible policy provisions. In 1985, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recognized a task force to advocate for racial and other minority populations’ health care (Rivas et al. 2019). The task force documented the critical areas that needed government intervention to improve healthcare access quality for Racial and other minority populations.
Social determinants of health inequalities faced by the population in different ZIP codes health status in the United States include poverty, incarceration, violence, racial discrimination, environmental exposure, and lack of aces to proper health care. The population of African Americans in the U.S. has grown to approximately 42.3 million, constituting thirteen percent of the entire population (Holingue et al., 2020). Although this percentage of the population comprises a minority group, its social and economic status affects their health status and disparities faced.
Racial discrimination deprives minority groups like Racial of access to quality health care. Racial differences correlate with education level, economic status, and access to health services. These disparities are associated with occupational hazards, quality of schooling, availability of healthy foods, exposure to toxic substances, violent neighborhoods, and environmental exposure or pollution (Holingue et al. 2020). Racism harms the morbidity, mortality, and psychopathological phenomena of the Black population because of the stress associated with daily life events damaging their immune, physiological, hormonal, and neuronal systems.
African Americans comprise one of the poorest ethnic groups in America. Poverty is a primary predictor and determinant of access to healthcare due to a shortage of basic human essentials. The racial poverty level is significantly correlated with poor healthcare access increasing mortality and morbidity. Poor economic status contributes to a poor lifestyle leading to the high prevalence of chronic diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, heart diseases, maternal complication, and obesity (Holingue et al. 2020). Since lack Americans are worst affected by poverty issues in the American population, the implications reflect their health status.
Furthermore, people living in environments with life-threatening conditions impact their health status. Many African Americans live in underprivileged neighborhoods with hazardous environmental conditions. These conditions contribute to an increase in chronic and lifestyle diseases. Again, a healthy diet is a problem for African Americans because of their socio-economic status (Bi et al. 2020). They can barely afford a meal a day. Lack of healthy foods leads to poor health and increases the rates of obesity and diabetes because they end up using alcohol and abusing other substances.
It is, therefore, essential to establish workable solutions to solve the multiple challenges affecting African Americans’ health status. Adaptation of health care intervention strategies to improve the quality of African Americans requires health organizations to enhance healthy living. Dealing with documented health inequalities on ethnic lines will require health intervention by identifying contemporary concerns on the health status of African Americans. Advocacy strategies to increase the benefits of African Americans’ health care for the American government require the stakeholders’ active involvement in various avenues to assess the policy’s stipulations, knowledge, and capacity using evidence-based interventions (Bi et al. 2020). It is essential to evaluate the level of awareness any population has on the approach to ensure that the community receives the correct and accurate information regarding the benefits and opportunities provided by the policy.
Community awareness requires health practitioners to create cross-relationships to ensure that available resources and news get their way into the population quickly and accurately. Advocating of loopholes and shortcomings of the policy to avoid generalization of the international community requires having custom-made policy amendments to ensure that the global recommendations are tailored to fit states’ healthcare situations (Wang et al. 2020). This is contrary to the common bracketing of African Americans health status concerns without factoring in major topographical issues peculiar to a specific population in any given community (Bi et al., 2020. Health policy leaders must eliminate racial and social disparities in access and provision by improving the quality of health facilities and resources provided to communities in depolarized conditions. Health practitioners and relevant stakeholders need to establish workable community programs to directly modify risky and compromising lifestyles to improve healthy living, especially among minority populations.
Identification and Justification of the Research Method
This study will adopt a survey research design because of the standardized procedure used in data collection using questionnaires and interviews to understand the population’s thoughts, behavior, attitude, and preferences in a systematic manner. The nature of the proposed research is descriptive and qualitative; this survey is the most suitable design to establish the relationship between the study variables. Studying the respondents from different residential locations within the same state to understand their differences in access to quality care as the unit of analysis plays a significant role as key informants in the research (Berndt 2020). Surveying this research will reduce the chances of having biased informants because the respondents will be situated in the phenomenon of interest to ensure the reliability and validity of the collected information.
Survey research is inherent because it is suitable for measuring a wide variety of unobservable variables like opinions, attitudes, behavior, beliefs, and preferences to generate factual data. Surveys are ideal for collecting information for a large population directly through simple data collection tools to increase the adequacy of the comparable variables of the unit of analysis (Berndt 2020). It allows the detection of minute variables affecting a population to enhance time and cost benefits for the researcher. Surveys are easily developed because they offer a triangulation method of data collection, increasing the reliability of the data and yielding consistent results. A vast range of hard-to-reach respondents is easier to reach when using traditional data collection methods like face-to-face interviews and questionnaires.
However, newer technological techniques are applicable, like online or mobile surveys, to increase respondent accessibility. The ways are cost-effective and easy to administer, expanding the research’s validity on geographically-dependent populations. For this study, it will be appropriate to survey various ZIP codes to increase the statistical relevance of the factual evidence (Berndt 2020). This will help to match with empirical evidence on the social impact of ZIP codes on human health based on determinant factors like residential instability, SES, and infrastructure.
Utilizing mixed descriptive methods, this paper explores the link between self-esteem or individual perception and academic accomplishment for teenagers in the respondents from different ZIP codes accessing public care facilities. Therefore, quantitative and subjective information from 86 respondents from other ZIP codes will be utilized to look at the connection between self-esteem and the quality of healthcare or behavior (Berndt 2020). For both tests, quantitative results illustrated that a drop in self-esteem was related to different pointers of afterward scholastic accomplishment. Whereas nation contrasts develop by the year’s conclusion, the math shows a steady relationship with self-esteem in both nation settings (Berndt 2020). Subjective investigations found a few backs for respondents from different ZIP codes’ self-perceptions as more precisely reflecting their scholastic involvement than the individuals.
Utilizing mixed techniques of data collection and longitudinal information, the reason for the show consider is twofold. To begin with, this examination analyzes the degree to which there’s a relationship between self-esteem and the quality of healthcare for persons in different ZIP codes (Long and Albert 2021). The moment, it looks at whether sexual orientation impacts any connections between self-esteem and quality healthcare. The settings within the study locale share several identities to help in mitigating certain factors (counting being arranged in urban, integrated, poor areas), and in essence, very adequately warrant cross-cultural examinations (Long and Albert 2021). This is a portion of a bigger investigation analyzing the implications of these two social settings on self-esteem/self-concept, scholarly accomplishment, school moves, and risky behavior.
Two expansive urban regions will be chosen for this study that, while broadly diverse, included major comparative socio-historic characteristics. The selection will try to order the control for other factors in expansion to broad state-associated social contrasts that will impact discoveries. The metropolitan locales will be chosen for their similitudes as more seasoned, industrialized, urban, multicultural districts with school frameworks having money-related challenges and generally comprehensive of working-class families. A depiction of the schools from distinctive cities will serve as a method to contextualize the lives of the individuals within the considered settings.
The study makes use of path investigation modeling techniques. Path analysis is a subset of regression analysis, a quantitative technique for determining the extent to which one variable (the “independent variable”) affects another variable (the “dependent variable”) (Berndt 2020). Models of path investigation infer hypothesized affiliations or directed links between collections of sequentially requested parameters. Typically, a given demonstration is depicted as a series of circles or boxes corresponding to the components connected with one-way bolts representing the postulated direction of causation (Berndt 2020). Each parameter in a path investigation demonstrates an element that is treated as a dependent variable in a recurrence investigation in which precursor factors are handled as independent variables. At the same time, a variable that functions as a subordinate variable in one segment of the show may function as an independent variable in another segment.
Limitations
Various limitations can emerge when collecting survey data to show the temporal association of the social impact of ZIP codes and human health. For instance, in ZIP codes with high populations, infectious diseases are rampant due to poor sanitation, infrastructure, and other SES factors, different from other highly populated regions with better facilities and access to quality care (Souza et al. 2017). The study will mitigate the biases of the generalization of data by increasing the population sample to have representative participants from various SES backgrounds.
It will correlate the findings with other social factors to establish the impact of the ZIP code on human health varying from state to state. The reliability of the respondents’ responses may be biased due to a lack of accuracy, honesty, and bias (Wang et al., 2020). To ensure reliable and truthful data collection, respondents will be assured of the secrecy of handling provided data to ensure that their responses offer socially acceptable answers and the real situation to show health inequalities in different ZIP codes.
Bibliography
Berndt, Andrea. 2020. “Sampling Methods.” Journal of Human Lactation, 36 (2: 224-226.
Bi, Qifang, Fangtao He, Kevin Konty, Hannah Gould, Stephen Immerwahr, and Amber Seligson. 2020. “ZIP Code-Level Estimates from a Local Health Survey: Added Value and Limitations.” Journal of Urban Health, 97 (4): 561-567.
Cummings, Janet, Lindsay Allen, Julie Clennon, Xu Ji, and Benjamin Druss. 2017. “Geographic Access to Specialty Mental Health Care across High-and Low-Income US Communities.” JAMA Psychiatry, 74 (5): 476-484.
Graham, Garth N. 2016. “Why Your ZIP Code Matters More Than Your Genetic Code: Promoting Healthy Outcomes from Mother to Child.” Breastfeed Med. 11(2): 386-397.
Holingue, Calliope, Elena Badillo-Goicoecheaa, Kira E. Riehma, Cindy B. Veldhuisc, Johannes Thrula, Renee M. Johnsona, Daniele Fallina, Frauke Kreuterd, Elizabeth Stuarta, and Luther G. Kalb. 2020. “Mental Distress during the COVID-19 Pandemic among US Adults without a Pre-Existing Mental Health Condition: Findings from American Trend Panel Survey.” Preventive Medicine, 139: 1-8.
Huyser, Kimberly, Tse-Chuan Yang, and Aggie J. Yellow Horse. 2021. “Indigenous Peoples, Concentrated Disadvantage and Income Inequality in New Mexico: A ZIP CodeLevel Investigation of Spatially Varying Associations between Socioeconomic Disadvantages and Confirmed COVID-19 Cases.” J Epidemiol Community Health, 0: 1-6.
Long, Kevin, and Steven M. Albert. 2021. “Use of Zip Code-Based Aggregate Indicators to Assess Race Disparities in COVID-19.” Ethnicity & Disease, 31 (3): 399-406.
Rivas, Ryan, Dinesh Patil, Vagelis Hristidis, Joseph R. Barr, and Narayanan Srinivasan. 2019. “The Impact of Colleges and Hospitals to Local Real Estate Markets.” Journal Of Big Data, 6 (1): 1-24.
Sen-Crowe, Brendon, I-Chun Lin, Robert Alfaro, Mark McKenney, and Adel Elkbuli. 2021. “COVID-19 Fatalities by Zip Codes and Socioeconomic Indicators across Various US Regions.” Annals of Medicine and Surgery 67: 1-10.
Souza, Ana Cláudia, Neusa Maria Costa Alexandre, and Edinêis de Brito Guirardello. 2017. “Psychometric Properties in Instruments Evaluation of Reliability and Validity.” Epidemiologia e Serviços de Saúde, 26: 649-659.
Wang, Jiaoe, Fangye Dua, Jie Huanga, and Yu Liu. 2020. “Access to Hospitals: Potential vs. Observed.” Cities, 100: 1-12.