The description and explanation of racial and ethnic health disparities are major initiatives of the public health research establishment. Black Americans suffer on nearly every measure of health in relation to white Americans. Five theoretical models have been proposed to explain these disparities: a racial-genetic model, a health-behavior model, a socioeconomic status model, a psychosocial stress model, and a structural-constructivist model. We selectively review literature on health disparities, emphasizing research on low birth weight and high blood pressure. The psychosocial stress model and the structural-constructivist model offer greatest promise to explain disparities. In future research, theoretical elaboration and operational specificity are needed to distinguish among three distinct factors: (a) genetic variants contributing to disease risk; (b) ethnoracial or folk racial categories masquerading as biology; and (c) ethnic group membership. Such elaboration is necessary to move beyond the conflation of these three distinct constructs that characterizes much of current research.

This article reports the replication after 10 years of cultural consensus analyses in four cultural domains in the city of Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. Additionally, two methods for evaluating residual agreement are applied to the data, and a new technique for evaluating how cultural knowledge is represented by residual agreement is introduced. We found that overall cultural consensus observed in 2001 was replicated in 2011 in four cultural domains. Significant residual agreement in all four cultural domains was observed using a technique for assessing the structure of the respondent-by-respondent agreement matrix. Analysis of loadings on the second factor from the cultural consensus analyses indicated that time period was associated with residual agreement in the domain of lifestyle, while other variables were associated with residual agreement in other domains. The variation in the configuration of elements in the cultural model of lifestyle within each time period, relative to the overall consensus, was examined using deviation scores. Implications of these results for the study of culture and the distribution and sharing of culture are discussed.