Jo Phelan
Biographic Data
| ID | 290877 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jo Phelan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jo |
| FAMILY NAME | Phelan |
| SIGNATURE | PHELAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-9068-9085 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6407 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 24 |
Impostorization in Academia, Psychological Distress, and Class Reproduction
Might “impostor syndrome” be more than the private trouble it is often described to be? Instead, might it be deeply rooted in sociological processes? I explore this possibility drawing on my personal experience and Pearlin’s insistence that much that distresses us in our personal lives originates in social structures. I use Bourdieu’s theory to conceptualize the processes that may instill the “syndrome,” and once in place, surreptitiously recreat…
Socioeconomic-Status-Based Disrespect, Discrimination, Exclusion, and Shaming
Observing an association between socioeconomic status (SES) and health reliably leads to the question, 'What are the pathways involved?' Despite enormous investment in research on the characteristics, behaviors, and traits of people disadvantaged with respect to health inequalities, the issue remains unresolved. We turn our attention to actions of more advantaged groups by asking people to self-report their exposure to disrespect, discrimination,…
Inequities gone or enduring? Evaluating the effects of a school-based antistigma intervention on race/ethnic and gender intersectional disparities in mental illness stigma
While significant mental illness stigma disparities across race/ethnicity and gender exist, little is known about the efficacy of anti-stigma interventions in reducing these intersectional disparities. We examine the two-year effects of school-based anti-stigma interventions on race/ethnic and gender intersectional stigma disparities among adolescents. An ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sixth grade sample ( N = 302) self-completed survey…
School Mental Health Curriculum Effects on Peer Violence Victimization and Perpetration
BACKGROUND: Addressing school violence is an important public health goal. To assess the role of school mental health curricula in violence prevention, we evaluated effects of an anti-stigma curriculum on violence victimization/perpetration. METHODS: An ethnically/socioeconomically diverse sample of 751 sixth-graders (mean age 11.5 years) across 14 schools in Texas were block-randomized by school (2011-2012) to receive singly or in combination: (…
Estimating School Race/Ethnic Enrollment Effects on Student Mental Health
Greater NL-White density increases mental health risk for NL-Black and low-stress Latinx students, while school diversity lowers risk for high-stress Latinx students. These findings demonstrate how educational settings may produce or lessen minority stress
Adolescent views of mental illness stigma
667; mean age = 11.5) self-completed assessments of their MI-related knowledge, positive attitudes, and behaviors toward peers with MI and adolescent vignettes described as experiencing bipolar (Julia) and social anxiety (David) symptoms. Self-reported race, ethnicity, and gender were combined to generate 6 intersectional composite variables: Latino boys, Latina girls, non-Latina/o (NL) Black boys, NL-Black girls, NL-White boys, and NL-White girl…
The Burden of Stigma on Health and Well-Being
Most individuals are stigmatized at some point. However, research often examines stigmas separately, thus underestimating the overall impact of stigma and precluding comparisons across stigmatized identities and conditions. In their classic text, Social Stigma: The Psychology of Marked Relationships, Edward Jones and colleagues laid the groundwork for unifying the study of different stigmas by considering the shared dimensional features of stigma…
Parental recognition of preadolescent mental health problems
Attitudes Toward Judicial Lenience and Government Assistance for Individuals With Mental Illness
A Social History of Disease
Fundamental cause theory posits that social inequalities in health arise because of unequal access to flexible resources, including knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections, which allow people to avoid risk factors and adopt protective factors relevant in a particular place. In this study, we posit that diseases should also be put into temporal context. We characterize diseases as transitioning through four stages at a…
The stigma of mental illness in the labor market
Trends in education gradients of 'preventable' mortality
Is Racism a Fundamental Cause of Inequalities in Health
We previously proposed that socioeconomic status (SES) is a fundamental cause of health inequalities and, as such, that SES inequalities in health persist over time despite radical changes in the diseases, risks, and interventions that happen to produce them at any given time. Like SES, race in the United States has an enduring connection to health and mortality. Our goals here are to evaluate whether this connection endures because systemic raci…
Racial and mental illness stereotypes and discrimination
The Virginia Tech and Columbine High shootings are 2 of the deadliest school massacres in the United States. The present study investigates in a nationally representative sample how White Americans' causal attributions of these shooting moderate their attitudes toward the shooter's race. White Americans shown a vignette based on the Virginia Tech shooting were more likely to espouse negative beliefs about Korean American men and distance themselv…
Direct-to-Consumer Racial Admixture Tests and Beliefs About Essential Racial Differences
Although at first relatively disinterested in race, modern genomic research has increasingly turned attention to racial variations. We examine a prominent example of this focus—direct-to-consumer racial admixture tests—and ask how information about the methods and results of these tests in news media may affect beliefs in racial differences. The reification hypothesis proposes that by emphasizing a genetic basis for race, thereby reifying race as…
Stigma, status, and population health
Stigma power
When people have an interest in keeping other people down, in or away, stigma is a resource that allows them to obtain ends they desire. We call this resource “stigma power” and use the term to refer to instances in which stigma processes achieve the aims of stigmatizers with respect to the exploitation, control or exclusion of others. We draw on Bourdieu, 1987 , Bourdieu, 1990 who notes that power is often most effectively deployed when it is hi…
Fundamental Cause Theory
Labeling and Stigma
Hatzenbuehler et al. Respond
AffiliationsMark L. Hatzenbuehler, Jo C. Phelan, and Bruce G. Link are with the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, and Bruce Link is also with the Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY
Stigma as a Fundamental Cause of Population Health Inequalities
Bodies of research pertaining to specific stigmatized statuses have typically developed in separate domains and have focused on single outcomes at 1 level of analysis, thereby obscuring the full significance of stigma as a fundamental driver of population health. Here we provide illustrative evidence on the health consequences of stigma and present a conceptual framework describing the psychological and structural pathways through which stigma in…
Culture, threat, and mental illness stigma
The Genomic Revolution and Beliefs about Essential Racial Differences
Could the explosion of genetic research in recent decades affect our conceptions of race? In Backdoor to Eugenics, Duster argues that reports of specific racial differences in genetic bases of disease, in part because they are presented as objective facts whose social implications are not readily apparent, may heighten public belief in more pervasive racial differences. We tested this hypothesis with a multi-method study. A content analysis showe…
Stigma and Status
This article explicates and distinguishes the processes that produce status orders and those that produce stigmatization. It describes an experimental study in which participants were assigned interaction partners before completing a task where they had opportunities to be influenced by the partners and opportunities to socially reject the partners. Results show clear influence effects of educational attainment and mental illness but no effects f…
Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Health Inequalities
Link and Phelan (1995) developed the theory of fundamental causes to explain why the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in the diseases and risk factors that are presumed to explain it. They proposed that the enduring association results because SES embodies an array of resources, such as money, knowledge, prestige, power, and beneficial social connections that protect health no matt…
Conceptualizing Stigma
Social science research on stigma has grown dramatically over the past two decades, particularly in social psychology, where researchers have elucidated the ways in which people construct cognitive categories and link those categories to stereotyped beliefs. In the midst of this growth, the stigma concept has been criticized as being too vaguely defined and individually focused. In response to these criticisms, we define stigma as the co-occurren…
Social Conditions As Fundamental Causes of Disease
Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Health Inequalities
Link and Phelan (1995) developed the theory of fundamental causes to explain why the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in the diseases and risk factors that are presumed to explain it. They proposed that the enduring association results because SES embodies an array of resources, such as money, knowledge, prestige, power, and beneficial social connections that protect health no matt…
Is Racism a Fundamental Cause of Inequalities in Health
We previously proposed that socioeconomic status (SES) is a fundamental cause of health inequalities and, as such, that SES inequalities in health persist over time despite radical changes in the diseases, risks, and interventions that happen to produce them at any given time. Like SES, race in the United States has an enduring connection to health and mortality. Our goals here are to evaluate whether this connection endures because systemic raci…
Stigma as a Fundamental Cause of Population Health Inequalities
Bodies of research pertaining to specific stigmatized statuses have typically developed in separate domains and have focused on single outcomes at 1 level of analysis, thereby obscuring the full significance of stigma as a fundamental driver of population health. Here we provide illustrative evidence on the health consequences of stigma and present a conceptual framework describing the psychological and structural pathways through which stigma in…
Culture and stigma
Stigma power
When people have an interest in keeping other people down, in or away, stigma is a resource that allows them to obtain ends they desire. We call this resource “stigma power” and use the term to refer to instances in which stigma processes achieve the aims of stigmatizers with respect to the exploitation, control or exclusion of others. We draw on Bourdieu, 1987 , Bourdieu, 1990 who notes that power is often most effectively deployed when it is hi…
Fundamental Causes' of Social Inequalities in Mortality
Medicine and epidemiology currently dominate the study of the strong association between socioeconomic status and mortality. Socioeconomic status typically is viewed as a causally irrelevant 'confounding variable' or as a less critical variable marking only the beginning of a causal chain in which intervening risk factors are given prominence. Yet the association between socioeconomic status and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in …
Stigma and prejudice
Understanding sociodemographic differences in health--the role of fundamental social causes
Understanding sociodemographic differences in health--the role of fundamental social causes. B G Link, and J C PhelanCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.86.4.471 Published Online: October 07, 2011
Controlling Disease and Creating Disparities
The United States and other developed countries experienced enormous improvements in population health during the 20th century. In the context of this dramatic positive change, health disparities by race and socioeconomic status emerged for several potent killers. Any explanation for current health disparities must take these changing patterns into account. Any explanation that ignores large improvements in population health and fails to account …
Trends in education gradients of 'preventable' mortality
Public Conceptions of Mental Illness in 1950 and 1996
Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Ann Stueve, Bernice A. Pescosolido, Public Conceptions of Mental Illness in 1950 and 1996: What Is Mental Illness and Is It to be Feared?, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 188-207
Geneticization of Deviant Behavior and Consequences for Stigma
One likely consequence of the genetics revolution is an increased tendency to understand human behavior in genetic terms. How might this 'geneticization' affect stigma? Attribution theory predicts a reduction in stigma via reduced blame, anger, and punishment and increased sympathy and help. According to 'genetic essentialist' thinking, genes are the basis of human identity and strongly deterministic of behavior. If such ideas are commonly accept…
The Stigma of Homelessness
Jo Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Robert E. Moore, Ann Stueve, The Stigma of Homelessness: The Impact of the Label "Homeless" on Attitudes Toward Poor Persons, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 323-337
Education, Social Liberalism, and Economic Conservatism
De nombreuses etudes lient education et attitudes liberales comme la tolerance et le soutien aux libertes publiques. Les AA. evaluent cette perspective. Ils testent trois hypotheses : les attitudes liberales resultent soit du developpement cognitif et personnel soit de la socialisation directe soit d'un affinage ideologique. Celles-ci ne permettent pas de predire les attitudes sociales. Ils affirment que le mecanisme par lequel l'education influe…
Stigma, status, and population health
The Resources That Matter
A robust and very persistent association between indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) and the onset of life-threatening disease is a prominent concern of medical sociology. The persistence of the association over time and its generality across very different places suggests that no fixed set of intervening risk and protective factors can account for the connection. Instead, fundamental-cause theory views SES-related resources of knowledge, mo…
The Genomic Revolution and Beliefs about Essential Racial Differences
Could the explosion of genetic research in recent decades affect our conceptions of race? In Backdoor to Eugenics, Duster argues that reports of specific racial differences in genetic bases of disease, in part because they are presented as objective facts whose social implications are not readily apparent, may heighten public belief in more pervasive racial differences. We tested this hypothesis with a multi-method study. A content analysis showe…
Stigma and Status
This article explicates and distinguishes the processes that produce status orders and those that produce stigmatization. It describes an experimental study in which participants were assigned interaction partners before completing a task where they had opportunities to be influenced by the partners and opportunities to socially reject the partners. Results show clear influence effects of educational attainment and mental illness but no effects f…
McKeown and the Idea That Social Conditions Are Fundamental Causes of Disease
In an accompanying commentary, Colgrove indicates that McKeown's thesis—that dramatic reductions in mortality over the past 2 centuries were due to improved socioeconomic conditions rather than to medical or public health interventions—has been “overturned” and his theory “discredited.” McKeown sought to explain a very prominent trend in population health and did so with a strong emphasis on the importance of basic social and economic conditions.…
A Social History of Disease
Fundamental cause theory posits that social inequalities in health arise because of unequal access to flexible resources, including knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections, which allow people to avoid risk factors and adopt protective factors relevant in a particular place. In this study, we posit that diseases should also be put into temporal context. We characterize diseases as transitioning through four stages at a…
The Paradox of the Contented Female Worker
The «paradox of the contented female worker» is that although women have jobs with lower pay and less authority than men, they are equally satisfied with their jobs and employers. This paradox is demonstrated in a sample of male and female professionals and managers. Five possible explanations of the paradox are assessed: 1) women's lesser job rewards are perceived as equitable because they are matched by lower job inputs; 2) women's lesser rewar…
Public knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about homeless people
Media reports suggest that the public is becoming impatient with the homeless—that so‐called “compassion fatigue” has gripped the nation. This characterization of public sentiment could have important policy consequences—restrictive measures can be justified by growing public impatience, and progressive housing policies seem infeasible within a hostile climate of opinion. But evidence to support the compassion fatigue notion is anecdotal. We exam…
The stigma of mental illness in the labor market
The Work Environments of Male and Female Professionals
Structured interviews were conducted with 1,115 male and 271 female professional employees of a major American corporation. Statistically significant gender differences were found in each of three objective job characteristics (job title, salary grade, and number of employees supervised), whereas few significant gender differences were found in subjective job characteristics (intrinsic and importance rewards, peer cohesion, staff support, role co…
The Paradox of the Contented Female Worker
The «paradox of the contented female worker» is that although women have jobs with lower pay and less authority than men, they are equally satisfied with their jobs and employers. This paradox is demonstrated in a sample of male and female professionals and managers. Five possible explanations of the paradox are assessed: 1) women's lesser job rewards are perceived as equitable because they are matched by lower job inputs; 2) women's lesser rewar…
Public knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about homeless people
Media reports suggest that the public is becoming impatient with the homeless—that so‐called “compassion fatigue” has gripped the nation. This characterization of public sentiment could have important policy consequences—restrictive measures can be justified by growing public impatience, and progressive housing policies seem infeasible within a hostile climate of opinion. But evidence to support the compassion fatigue notion is anecdotal. We exam…
Lifetime and five-year prevalence of homelessness in the United States
A 1990 household-based telephone survey of 1,507 people was followed up by surveying a subsample of those interviewed for the initial report. Results showed very high prevalence figures for homelessness, quite close to those found in the earlier survey. Moreover, using explicit and stringent definitions of literal homelessness and doubling up, most periods of homelessness were found to last for more than one month and, particularly with regard to…
Education, Social Liberalism, and Economic Conservatism
De nombreuses etudes lient education et attitudes liberales comme la tolerance et le soutien aux libertes publiques. Les AA. evaluent cette perspective. Ils testent trois hypotheses : les attitudes liberales resultent soit du developpement cognitif et personnel soit de la socialisation directe soit d'un affinage ideologique. Celles-ci ne permettent pas de predire les attitudes sociales. Ils affirment que le mecanisme par lequel l'education influe…
Social Conditions As Fundamental Causes of Disease
Understanding sociodemographic differences in health--the role of fundamental social causes
Understanding sociodemographic differences in health--the role of fundamental social causes. B G Link, and J C PhelanCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.86.4.471 Published Online: October 07, 2011
The Stigma of Homelessness
Jo Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Robert E. Moore, Ann Stueve, The Stigma of Homelessness: The Impact of the Label "Homeless" on Attitudes Toward Poor Persons, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 323-337
Social Epidemiology and the Fundamental Cause Concept
Since the early 1800s, studies have consistently demonstrated that people higher in the socioeconomic hierarchy live longer than people of lower rank. One hypothesis for the persistence of this association is that people who are relatively better off are more able to avoid risks by adopting currently available protective strategies. In a partial test of this idea, the social distributions of two cancer screening tests—Pap smears and mammography—w…
Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health
Public Conceptions of Mental Illness in 1950 and 1996
Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Ann Stueve, Bernice A. Pescosolido, Public Conceptions of Mental Illness in 1950 and 1996: What Is Mental Illness and Is It to be Feared?, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 188-207
Stigma as a Barrier to Recovery
OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to determine whether stigma affects the self-esteem of persons who have serious mental illnesses or whether stigma has few, if any, effects on self-esteem. METHODS: Self-esteem and two aspects of stigma, namely, perceptions of devaluation-discrimination and social withdrawal because of perceived rejection, were assessed among 70 members of a clubhouse program for people with mental illness at baseline an…
The Sociology of Mental Health
Conceptualizing Stigma
Social science research on stigma has grown dramatically over the past two decades, particularly in social psychology, where researchers have elucidated the ways in which people construct cognitive categories and link those categories to stereotyped beliefs. In the midst of this growth, the stigma concept has been criticized as being too vaguely defined and individually focused. In response to these criticisms, we define stigma as the co-occurren…
McKeown and the Idea That Social Conditions Are Fundamental Causes of Disease
In an accompanying commentary, Colgrove indicates that McKeown's thesis—that dramatic reductions in mortality over the past 2 centuries were due to improved socioeconomic conditions rather than to medical or public health interventions—has been “overturned” and his theory “discredited.” McKeown sought to explain a very prominent trend in population health and did so with a strong emphasis on the importance of basic social and economic conditions.…
Internalized stigma predicts erosion of morale among psychiatric outpatients
Fundamental Causes' of Social Inequalities in Mortality
Medicine and epidemiology currently dominate the study of the strong association between socioeconomic status and mortality. Socioeconomic status typically is viewed as a causally irrelevant 'confounding variable' or as a less critical variable marking only the beginning of a causal chain in which intervening risk factors are given prominence. Yet the association between socioeconomic status and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in …
Fear of People with Mental Illnesses
Vignette and laboratory experiments suggest that negative reactions to people with mental illness are a direct consequence of their symptomatic behavior, but because of their poor external validity, these studies cannot tell us whether widespread negative public reactions to people with mental illness actually result from observation of symptomatic behavior. Focusing on perceived danger, we use a large national survey to test the 'behavior hypoth…
Controlling Disease and Creating Disparities
The United States and other developed countries experienced enormous improvements in population health during the 20th century. In the context of this dramatic positive change, health disparities by race and socioeconomic status emerged for several potent killers. Any explanation for current health disparities must take these changing patterns into account. Any explanation that ignores large improvements in population health and fails to account …
Geneticization of Deviant Behavior and Consequences for Stigma
One likely consequence of the genetics revolution is an increased tendency to understand human behavior in genetic terms. How might this 'geneticization' affect stigma? Attribution theory predicts a reduction in stigma via reduced blame, anger, and punishment and increased sympathy and help. According to 'genetic essentialist' thinking, genes are the basis of human identity and strongly deterministic of behavior. If such ideas are commonly accept…
Stigma and its public health implications
Culture and stigma
Stigma and beliefs of efficacy towards traditional Chinese medicine and Western psychiatric treatment among Chinese-Americans
In this study we examined community attitudes of efficacy and shame to investigate the factors that may underlie mental health service underutilization among Chinese Americans. We administered an experimental vignette to assess beliefs of efficacy and shame toward using traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as opposed to Western health services in a sample of 90 Chinese Americans obtained through a national telephone survey. Contrary to predictions,…
Racial Differences in Beliefs About the Effectiveness and Necessity of Mental Health Treatment
Members of racial/ethnic minority groups are less likely than Caucasians to access mental health services despite recent evidence of more favorable attitudes regarding treatment effectiveness. The present study explored this discrepancy by examining racial differences in beliefs about how the natural course and seriousness of mental illnesses relate to perceived treatment effectiveness. The analysis is based on a nationally representative sample …
Stigma and prejudice
Psychology (40 works) · Psychiatry (26 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Medicine (22 works) · Mental health (20 works) · Mental Health Treatment and Access (20 works) · Health disparities and outcomes (16 works) · Clinical Psychology (15 works) · Racial and Ethnic Identity Research (14 works)