@article{121676,
  author = {Alison M. Buttenheim and Noreen Goldman and Anne R. Pebley and Rebeca Wong and Chang Chung},
  title = {Do Mexican Immigrants "Import" Social Gradients in Health to the US?},
  abstract = { Greater educational attainment is consistently associated with lower mortality and better health, a pattern known as the social gradient. However, recent research suggests that Mexican-origin adults in the US have weak or flat gradients, in contrast to steep gradients for non-Hispanic whites. In this study we evaluate one hypothesis for this finding: Is the relative weakness of education gradients in health behaviors observed among Mexican-origin adults in the US due to weak gradients in the sending population? We test this {\textquotedblleft}imported gradients{\textquotedblright} hypothesis with data from two nationally-representative datasets: the US National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Mexican National~<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/health-survey" title="Learn more about Health Survey">Health Survey</a>~(ENSA 2000). We compare education gradients in smoking and obesity for recently-arrived Mexican immigrants in the US to the corresponding gradients in high-migration regions of Mexico. Results partially support the imported gradients hypothesis and have implications for health education and promotion programs targeted to immigrant populations to reduce~<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/racial-disparity" title="Learn more about Racial Disparity">racial and ethnic disparities</a>~in health in the US. },
  year = {2010},
  journal = {Social Science \& Medicine},
  volume = {71},
  pages = {1268-1276},
  url = {https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057170/},
  language = {eng},
}