Can We Measure and Analyze Structural Racism in the Study of Health?

ABSTRACT In this paper, we critique the concept of structural racism as a determinant of health, as it is operationalized in quantitative research. Our review is not a defense of the concept but a critical examination. From this review, we share several different areas for methodological innovations, including identifying macro‐micro‐macro linkages, and measuring the absence of structural racism, versus assuming it is uniformly present in all social environments. Our review finds that the literature on structural racism is, for the most part, “walking backwards into the future,” rebranding established methods and measures with an innovative term of art, without creating new research designs, measures, methods and analyses. Therefore, we offer the following overarching criticism: researchers have not yet built a study of structural racism around methods that disclose this phenomenon in ways we did not previously understand. We posit that unless researchers can provide clearer and more innovative operationalizations of this concept, it and measurement of the phenomena, is likely to fade into obscurity as academic trends shift.