Disentangling race and socioeconomic status: a key to understanding health inequalities.

This article addresses one of the most vexing problems facing health disparities researchers, the confounding of race and socioeconomic status. This article does the following: (1) it outlines the magnitude of confounding between race and socioeconomic status; (2) it demonstrates problems caused by this confounding; (3) it examines the degree to which race disparities are a function of socioeconomic status; and (4) it discusses considerations for advancing research on health disparities after accounting for the confounding of race and socioeconomic status.