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Camara Phyllis Jones

Senior Fellow, Satcher Health Leadership Institute and Cardiovascular Research Institute, Morehouse School of Medicine
Chapter Member: Georgia SSN

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About Camara Phyllis

Jones' research focuses on social epidemiology, research methods, social determinants of health, and anti-racism. Overarching themes in Jones' writings include naming, measuring, and addressing the impacts of racism on health and well-being.

In the News

Research discussed by Claudia Wallis, in "Why Racism, Not Race, Is a Risk Factor for Dying of COVID-19," Scientific American, June 12, 2020.
Quoted by Edwin Rios and Sinduja Rangarajan in "COVID-19 Has Infected and Killed Black People At Alarming Rates. This Data Proves It.," Mother Jones, April 17, 2020.

Publications

"Systems of Power, Axes of Inequity: Parallels, Intersections, Braiding the Strands" PubMed 52 (2014): S71-S75.

Builds on work examining the impacts of racism onhealth to identify parallels and intersections with regard to able-ism and health. The"Cliff Analogy"framework for distinguishing between five levels of health intervention is used to sort the Healthy People 2020 goals onDisability and Health along an array from medical care to addressing the social determinants of equity.

"Levels of Racism: a Theoretic Framework and a Gardener's Tale" American Journal of Public Health 90, no. 8 (2000): 1212–1215.

Presents a theoretic framework for understanding racism on 3 levels: institutionalized, personally mediated, and internalized. This framework is useful for raising new hypotheses about the basis of race- associated differences in health outcomes, as well as for designing effective interventions to eliminate those differences.

"Addressing the Social Determinants of Children's Health: a Cliff Analogy" (with Clara Yvonne Jones, Geraldine S. Perry, Gillian Barclay, and Camille Arnel Jones). Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 20, no. 4 (2009): 1-12.

Presents a "Cliff Analogy" illustrating three dimensions of health intervention to help people who are falling off of the cliff of good
health: providing health services, addressing the social determinants of health, and addressing the social determinants of equity. In the terms of the analogy, health services include an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, a net or trampoline halfway down, and a fence at the top of the cliff.

"Using "Socially Assigned Race" to Probe White Advantages in Health Status" (with Benedict I Truman, Laurie D Elam-Evans, Camille A Jones, Clara Y Jones, Ruth Jiles, Susan F Rumisha, and Geraldine S Perry). PubMed 18, no. 4 (2008): 496-504.

Finds an agreement of socially assigned race with self-identified race/ethnicity varied across the racial/ethnic groups currently defined by the United Statesgovernment.Included among those usually classified by others as White were 26.8% of those who self-identified as Hispanic, 47.6% of those who self-identified as American Indian, and 59.5% of those who self-identified with more than one race.

"Toward the Science and Practice of Anti-Racism: Launching a National Campaign Against Racism" (with Camara Phyllis Jones). Ethnicity and Disease 28 (2018): 231-234.

Calls public health researchers and practitioners to name racism, ask how is racism operating in their field, and organize and strategize to act. It includes a framework for an Anti-Racism Collaborative as a platform for organizing this work going forward.

"Living Beyond Our “Means”: New Methods for Comparing Distributions" American Journal of Epidemiology 146, no. 12 (1997): 1056-1066.

Introduces the projection methods for describing and testing the differences between pairs of continuous distributions. These methods include the projection plot, the projection spline, and the iter-1 test. The projection plot displays the difference between corresponding quantiles against the average of the corresponding quantiles.