The third question we investigated concerns the extent to which social disadvantage helps to explain racial/ethnic disparities in alcohol-related problems. We found that social disadvantage played a relatively modest role in explaining disparities in problems. Racial/ethnic stigma appears to have greatest relevance, followed by poverty, which contributes to black-white differences in dependence symptoms among low-level heavy drinkers. We were surprised that perceived unfair treatment did not play a stronger role, since we had previously found it to be a strong predictor of alcohol problems within racial/ethnic groups, and it was more often reported by minorities (Mulia, et al., in press). We suspect that because our measure of unfair treatment does not specify an attribution to race/ethnicity per se, the potential mediating effects of unfair treatment based on minority status could have been diluted. We believe that the measure of racial/ethnic stigma better captures experiences of minority status, since it asks more directly about perceived social inequalities based on race/ethnicity. Notably, racial/ethnic stigma varied widely across minority status, and had the largest and most consistent effects for reducing racial/ethnic disparities in problems.
