STRESS REMEDY

Minority stress describes well documented chronically high levels of stress faced by members of stigmatized minority groups. It may be caused by a number of factors, including poor social support and low socioeconomic status; well understood causes of minority stress are interpersonal prejudice and discrimination.

 Governmental discrimination typically takes form in constitutional discrimination and stays that way until equal protections are applied. Many of these have roots in scriptural discrimination. Indeed, numerous scientific studies have shown that minority individuals experience a high degree of prejudice, which causes stress responses e.g., high blood pressure, anxiety that accrue over time, eventually leading to poor mental and physical health. Minority stress theory summarizes these scientific studies to explain how difficult social situations lead to chronic stress and poor health among minority individuals. It is an important concept for psychologists and public health officials who seek to understand and reduce minority health disparities.

Theoretical development 

Emergence Summarical 🗣️

Over the past three decades, social scientists have found that minority individuals suffer from mental and physical health disparities compared to their peers in majority groups. This research has focused primarily on racial and sexual minorities. For example, African Americans have been found to suffer elevated rates of hypertension compared to Whites. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual  LGB individuals face higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, and cancer relative to heterosexuals. These health disparities impact day-to-day well-being as well as overall life expectancy, leading social scientists to ask: How can we reduce minority health disparities? In order to answer this question, it was first important to explore the underlying causes of the disparities.

Social selection hypothesis Edit

One causal explanation for minority health disparities is the social selection hypothesis, which holds that there is something inherent to being in a minority group e.g., genetics that makes individuals susceptible to health problems. In general, this view has not been supported by empirical research. If minority individuals were genetically predisposed to poor health outcomes, the vast majority of them should face health disparities. However, large-scale empirical studies have shown that most of LGB individuals do not suffer psychopathology and that many African Americans do not have heart disease. Instead, research suggests that environmental factors explain minority health disparities better than do genetic factors. While the social selection hypothesis is still debated, it is clear that genetic and dispositional factors do not fully explain the health disparities observed in minority groups.

Social causation hypothesis Analysis 🥦

A second hypothesis regarding the causes of minority health disparities suggests that minority group members face difficult social situations that lead to poor health. This hypothesis has received broad empirical support. Indeed, social psychologists have long recognized that minority individuals have different social experiences compared to majority individuals, including prejudice and discrimination, unequal socioeconomic status, and limited access to health care. According to the social causation hypothesis, such difficult social experiences explain health differences between minority and majority individuals.

Overview of minority stress theory 

Evidence of key concepts 

Criticism and limitations.

Despite multiple studies indicating that minority individuals face a high degree of stress related to their minority identity, and that minority stress is associated with poor health outcomes, there are several methodological limitations and ongoing debates on this topic.

First, the minority stress concept has been criticized as focusing too narrowly on the negative experiences of minority individuals and ignoring the unique coping strategies and social support structures available to them. While theoretical writings about minority stress do note the importance of coping mechanisms for minority individuals, individual studies that use minority stress theory tend to focus on negative health outcomes rather than on coping mechanisms. In the future, it will be important for researchers to consider both positive and negative aspects of minority group membership, examining whether and why one of those aspects outweighs the other in determining minority health outcomes.

Also, few studies have been able to test minority stress theory in full. Most studies have examined one of the three links described above, demonstrating that minority individuals face heightened rates of prejudice, that minority individuals face health disparities, or that prejudice is related to health disparities. Together, findings from these three areas corroborate minority stress theory, but a stronger test would examine all three parts in the same study. While there have been a few such studies, further replication is necessary to support the presumed pathways underlying minority stress.

Most studies of minority stress are correlational. While these studies have the advantage of using large, national datasets to establish links between minority status, stressors, and health, they cannot demonstrate causality. That is, most of the existing research cannot prove that prejudice causes stress, which causes poor health outcomes among minority individuals, because correlation does not imply causation. One way to remedy this limitation is to employ experimental and longitudinal research designs to test the impact of social stressors on health. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to use these more stringent tests of minority stress. Additional studies are needed to confidently state that prejudice causes poor health for minority individuals.

Finally, it is unclear whether different minority groups face different types of minority stress and different health outcomes following prejudice. Minority stress theory was originally developed to explain associations between social situations, stress, and health for LGB individuals. Still, researchers have used the same general theory to examine stress processes among African Americans, and findings have generally converged with those from LGB populations. Thus, it is possible that minority stress applies broadly to members of diverse minority groups. However, studies have yet to directly compare experiences, stress responses, and health outcomes among individuals from diverse minority groups. Systematic comparisons are necessary to clarify whether minority stress applies to all minority individuals broadly, or whether different models are required for different groups.