Document Type
Article
Abstract
Purpose: Despite efforts to reduce health disparities, Black Americans still face higher mortality rates than Whites. Racism has been recognized as a significant social determinant of health. Using social media data, human-being qualitative coding, and AI, we created a county-level racial discrimination index, exploring its association with years of potential life lost (YPLL) rates. Methods: Through human-AI collaborative approaches using X/Twitter data, we calculated yearly county-level racial discrimination index (RDI)—number of racial discrimination posts per 100,000 in-county non-duplicated posts and examined the relationship between RDI terciles and YPLL per 100,000 non-Hispanic Black individuals. Annual data for the covariates were derived from 2018–2022 County Health Rankings and American Community Surveys across all South Carolina (SC) counties. Results: RDI increased from 2018 (mean [SD], 1.443 [1.991]) to 2022 (3.439 [5.761]). Adjusting for county sociodemographic factors and historical trends, RDI was associated with the YPLL rate (marginal effects, highest vs. lowest tercile, 421.3; 95% confidence interval, 134.7–709.8; p = 0.006). Conclusions: Digital racial discrimination was highly associated with Black YPLL rates, confirming the importance of racial discrimination in health disparity, especially premature deaths. Addressing explicit and implicit racism in highly affected counties is crucial for reducing persistent health inequities and promoting equity in communities.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 2025.
APA Citation
Ma, Y., Hung, P., Shen, X., Li, Z., Tucker, C., & Zhang, J. (2025). Examining Racial Discrimination Index and Black-Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL) in South Carolina: A Real-Time Social Media Research. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-025-02416-7
Rights
© The Author(s) 2025 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.