Social Sciences and Medicine



Social Sciences and Medicine

Introduction

The three summarized articles are based on the studies conducted by Heide Castañeda, Heeran Chun and Annette J Browne. All of them highlight the inequality in health care provision based on socio-economic differences. They also provide guidelines for eliminating this discriminatory criterion and thus providing equal health care services to all members of the population.

Discussion

Article 1: False hope: Effects of social class and health policy on oral health inequalities for migrant farm worker families

Heide Castañeda

According to the study conducted by Heide Castañeda, families of migrant farm workers often remain deprived of proper dental care due to continuous mobilization. The state of Florida has the lowest records of provision of dental care to children belonging to low socio-economic class (Casamassimo, 2003). It has also the least number of Medicaid enrolled children. Interviews with migrant farm worker parents and dentists along with participant observation at a Migrant Head Start Center and dental clinics were performed to view the major causes behind poor dental health among the migrant farm workers. Study revealed that lack of dental knowledge, language, cultural and ethnic differences are not the actual reason. Ineffective policies and insufficiency of their implementation along with structural features is the main cause of inequality in delivery of dental care (Castañeda; Carrion; Kline; Tyson, 2010).

The main motive of this study was to find the root cause of disparities of dental health care providence to the low-income population, particularly the migrant farm worker families. Further evaluation of the effects of socio-economic status and the health policies of the state were also included in the major purpose of this study in order to obtain significant results regarding poor oral health among these families.

Two sets of participant groups were designed for conducting interviews in this study. First group comprised of a total of 19 dental health providers. Second group was constituted by 48 migrant farm worker parents located in Central Florida when interview was conducted; 73 of them were female and 11 were male i.e. 77% of the sample was female while only 23% was male.

Participant observation was utilized as a method for this study. Interviews of dental health providers and parents who were migrant farm workers were conducted; audio-recording was done followed by subsequent transcription in two phases. Translation was preceded by coding. First phase included retrieval of deductive codes from research papers and interview guide. Second phase comprised of creation of inductive codes and their application for identifying more patterns that was generated from the data.

This study revealed that low dental health literacy is not the actual cause of poor dental health among the farm worker families, rather inaccessibility to children with Medicaid to dental facilities, ineffective policies of dental health for low socio-economic communities resulting in shortage of dentists in underprivileged areas due to low reimbursement rates.

The findings of this study are reliable only to a short extent because of random sampling strategy. It does not provide the impact of structural factors affecting access to ...