Health and Human Services: Identity, Ethics, and Equitable Care

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the social determinants of health, systems of power, structural racism, ethics, intersectionality, and the biological pathways of stress in Health and Human Services.

Intersectionality

A theoretical model coined and popularized by Kimberlé Crenshaw that serves as a lens or prism for examining how interlocking systems of power and inequality—such as race, gender, class, and sexuality—operate together and exacerbate one another, producing experiences that are more than the sum of their parts.

Epigenetics

The interactions between genetic code (genotypes) and the external environment that alter genetic transcription and expression, demonstrating that observable physical characteristics (phenotypes) are continuous rather than strictly categorical.

Individual Racial Prejudice

A form of racism occurring when an individual is motivated by conscious racial animus—an explicit dislike of others based solely on perceived group membership—typically rooted in the belief that race is an ontologically real biological predictor of human traits.

Implicit Racial Bias

Negative perceptions and unconscious associations regarding individuals based on race that operate outside conscious awareness, empirically demonstrated to affect healthcare provider attitudes, clinical decisions, and patient outcomes.

Structural Racism

Significant population-level disparities in life experiences and outcomes resulting from historical and ongoing social, economic, and political institutions that systematically favor white individuals over other racial groups, functioning independently of conscious individual animus.

Residential Redlining

An explicit 20th-century federal housing policy that systematically prevented African American families from purchasing homes in specific neighborhoods, severely restricting intergenerational wealth accumulation and contributing to long-term health disparities.

Sex vs. Gender

Sex refers to biological dimorphism of reproductive organs and secondary sexual characteristics, whereas gender refers to the socially constructed norms, roles, and expectations associated with identities like manhood and womanhood.

The Combahee River Collective

A Black Lesbian feminist organization that published a 1977 statement arguing that systems of racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression are experienced simultaneously and must be resisted through an interlocking, collective political framework.

Identity Politics

A term originally coined by the Combahee River Collective in 1977 to describe a theoretical and practical approach to political organizing grounded specifically in the shared, intersecting identities and lived struggles of marginalized groups.

Classroom to Prison Pipeline

A systemic pattern of disproportionate disciplinary responses, police contact, and arrest of students of color within school environments, funneling youth from educational institutions into the criminal justice system.

Wage Slavery

A 19th-century concept describing laborers being forced to rent their time to industrial owners to survive, which labor activists compared to chattel slavery and which remains the dominant income model in modern capitalism.

Utilitarian Approach

An ethical framework formulated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill asserting that moral actions and laws are those that maximize overall benefit and minimize harm, aiming for the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Rights-Based Approach

An ethical framework influenced by Immanuel Kant centered on individual moral agency, dignity, and autonomy, asserting that ethical practice must respect an individual's fundamental rights to truth, privacy, and freedom from harm.

Stages of Moral Development

Lawrence Kohlberg's hierarchical framework of moral reasoning encompassing Pre-conventional (punishment avoidance, self-interest; ages 3–7), Conventional (good boy attitude, law and order; ages 8–13), and Post-conventional levels (social contract, universal ethical principle; adulthood).

Care Ethics

A moral philosophy introduced by Carol Gilligan in 'In a Different Voice' (1982) arguing that moral reasoning is fundamentally rooted in interpersonal relationships, relational interdependence, care, and collective benevolence rather than abstract individual rules.

Oath of Modern Hippocrates

A secular, modernized professional medical oath wherein clinicians formally pledge competence, integrity, candor, personal commitment to patient best interests, compassion, discretion, and legal confidentiality.

HIPAA

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal statute establishing legal requirements and boundaries for protecting, sharing, and maintaining the confidentiality of patient health information.

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

Independent committees established in response to historical research abuses like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study to review, monitor, and approve research protocols involving human subjects to protect their ethical rights and welfare.

Human Flourishing

A core public health concept defined by the APHA as the realization of inherent human potential, capabilities, agency, and community well-being, opposed not only by disease but by social conditions of oppression, exploitation, and discrimination.

NOHS Code of Ethics

The National Organization of Human Services ethical guidelines rooted in five core values: respecting human dignity/welfare, promoting self-determination, honoring cultural diversity, advocating for social justice, and acting with integrity, honesty, genuineness, and objectivity.

Primitive Accumulation

Karl Marx's concept describing the historical process—driven by colonization, Indigenous land theft, and chattel slavery—that concentrated massive foundational wealth into European hands to establish the capitalist economic system.

Means of Production

The physical capital, machinery, land, and resources (such as factories and farms) required to produce goods, which are owned and regulated by the ruling capitalist class.

Contradictions (Marxist Theory)

Structural inconsistencies inherent to capitalism where the system's operational requirements conflict with its social promises, such as needing to pay workers less than the value of their labor while expecting them to afford basic necessities.

Antagonisms (Marxist Theory)

The inevitable social tensions and conflicts that emerge between capital owners seeking to maximize profit and workers seeking equitable compensation, leading to labor unrest, strikes, or political revolutions.

Health Disparities

Preventable, unjust, and systematic population-level differences in disease incidence, prevalence, severity, and healthcare quality that arise from structural inequities rather than biological or genetic variation.

Social Determinants of Health (SDOH)

The non-medical conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that influence functioning, quality of life, and disease outcomes, categorized into five broad domains by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Economic Stability

An SDOH domain encompassing income, employment security, and poverty levels, directly determining access to essential health resources such as nutritious food, stable housing, medication, and health coverage.

Neighborhood and Built Environment

An SDOH domain focusing on geographic and physical living conditions, including walkability, green space, housing quality, proximity to medical facilities, environmental toxins, and exposure to aggressive policing.

Personal Health Literacy

The degree to which an individual has the ability to find, understand, and use health information and services to make informed health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.

Organizational Health Literacy

The degree to which healthcare organizations equitably enable patients and communities to find, understand, and utilize health information and services to guide care decisions.

Social and Community Context

An SDOH domain addressing the social environment, cultural attitudes, community stigma around care seeking, interpersonal relationships, and collective exposure to discrimination and structural stress.

Neurobiological Embedding of Stress Model

A conceptual pathway showing how environmental factors (trauma, structural racism, poverty, chronic stress) act upon biological mediators (allostatic load, endocrine disruption, HPA dysregulation) to cause clinical health outcomes like depression, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

Allostatic Load

An aggregate biological measure of the cumulative physiological wear and tear experienced by the body due to continuous, repeated adaptation to chronic environmental stressors.

Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) Axis

The primary neuroendocrine feedback complex regulating the human physiological response to stress, which becomes dysregulated under chronic social and environmental adversity.

Endocrine Disruption

Adverse alterations in the body's hormonal systems triggered by severe chronic stress or toxic chemical exposures that compromise metabolic, cardiovascular, and overall physiological health.

Social Justice in HHS

A systematic professional and ethical commitment across health and human service disciplines aimed at eliminating oppression, addressing unequal distributions of resources, and guaranteeing equal dignity, health equity, and human rights for all populations.