Interpreting Health Differences between Self-reported Black and White Children in U.S.: Insights from a Methodological Perspective

Understanding health differences among racial groups in child development is crucial for addressing inequalities that may affect various aspects of a child’s life. However, factors such as household and neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) often covary with health differences between races, making it challenging to accurately reveal these differences using conventional covariate-control methods such as multiple regression. Alternative methods, such as Propensity Score Matching (PSM), may provide better covariate control. Supporting this notion, we found that PSM is more sensitive than regression-based methods in detecting health differences between self-reported Black and White children across a wide range of behavioral and neural measurements in the ABCD (5636 White, 1350 Black). Puberty status, an index of physical maturation, emerged as the largest difference between races and mediated the health differences between races on the majority of behavioral and neural variables. These findings highlight the importance of controlling for pubertal status and using more effective covariate-control methods to accurately represent health differences between Black and White children.