Recent Health Services PhD graduate Shanise Owens discusses her thesis, which digs into the lingering impacts of redlining on generational wealth and BMI.
In recent years, the devastating legacy of redlining in America has received renewed attention, even spurring a $107 million initiative from the Justice Department. Health Services PhD graduate Shanise Owens recently contributed to this vital and growing area of research with her PhD thesis, “Assessing the Influence of Redlining on Intergenerational Wealth and Body Mass Index Through a Quasi-experimental Framework.”
Owens also mentors students at the ARCH Center and serves on the School of Public Health Advisory Board. She has held many roles in public health, including at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, Kaiser Permanente, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and currently works as a Clinical Research Scientist at Seattle Children’s Hospital.
Her years working at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of Minority Health, along with her own personal upbringing, inspired her focus on social determinants of health (SDOH). She became fascinated by the chain reaction in which policy shapes SDOH, and SDOH in turn influences health outcomes. Owens also stresses her own positionality within her research.
“I think who we are influences a lot of the work that we do,” Owens reflects. “I did use lived experience in thinking about how the determinants of health show up in terms of health outcomes within my own family. In using those [redlining] maps, I could go and look and see, ‘Oh, my grandparents lived in redlined areas,’ and think about how that influenced the trajectory of my parents, and how it influenced my trajectory.”
Using empirical methods to unpack generational wealth gaps
To find the right quantitative method to answer her research question, Owens conducted a deep dive into the preexisting literature and also completed an intensive dissertation development course. Through conversations with her dissertation chair, she landed on a quasi-experimental design called regression discontinuity. Because this method is more often used in economics and political science, Owens had to innovate to apply it to public health. As she explained, this method allows researchers to infer causal outcomes from observational data, thus simulating a randomized controlled trial. The border between redlined and yellow-lined areas was semi-arbitrary, thus allowing Owens to make a valid comparison between health and wealth outcomes of different neighborhoods.
She explained, “I use evidence from the literature, from history, historical documents, and other research that’s similar to mine. Then I put that generational component which I got from the theories I was using around life course theory and cumulative inequality theory and the public health critical race praxis. And I put this all together to formulate the methods.”
Using these quantitative methods informed by theory, Owens discovered a striking impact of redlining on wealth.
“I don’t think it was surprising that we would see a wealth disparity, but the magnitude was surprising. It was certainly significant,” Owens explained. “Throughout this country, even though people don’t realize it, many people are subsidized in different ways that allow them to build wealth. Homeownership, access to home loans, or subsidies like the G.I. Bill make a huge difference to the wealth outcomes that you and I have, because of that trickle-down effect coming from the grandparents to the parents to the grandchildren.”
Owens also found an effect on BMI levels, albeit one that didn’t reach the level of statistical significance. She cautions that BMI is an imperfect proxy for obesity, which is associated with worse health outcomes.
Data-centric, equity-forward policy
Owens hopes her work will inspire policy-makers to think ‘big picture’ and consider the downstream effects of policies. She stresses that current-day disparities did not arise by accident, but rather from intentionally exclusionary government policies.“I hope my work helps decision-makers think long-term. We always want to do these short individual fixes. But if we think about prevention, prevention is like the long game. We need to be consistently uplifting generations to get them to a place where we have resolved the issues of the past that have happened. I think people know that these harms have taken place. But when we think about solving them, I don’t think it’s going to be resolved in my generation, [but] I know I can put forth efforts so that my children and my children’s children see something better.”