Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

My contribution discusses epidemiological knowledge-making from the postwar period until today, with a focus on classifications and categories. Today, epidemiology is a word on everyone’s lips. Epidemiological knowledge is habitually used as a basis for decision-making on the highest political level; data created with epidemiological methods are seen as representing truths about reality that are useful in public health policies. Nonetheless, epidemiology is constituted by scientific practices shaped in specific social and cultural contexts, behind which lie complex processes and assumptions about causation and risk (Trostle 2005). This becomes particularly visible when scrutinizing the categories employed in epidemiological research. 

Since the 1990s, identity categories such as gender, race/ethnicity, and class are used extensively to examine and explain patterns of health and disease in populations. However, historical, and localised perspectives reveal that constructions and uses of categories have varied considerably over time and place (Bredström & Mulinari 2024, 2023, 2022, Bauer 2013, 2019, Epstein 2007). This is partly an effect of the varying availability of data. In Sweden, health and population registers – some of which go back to the eighteenth century – are routinely used as sources of data. Registers are a prominent and distinctive feature of the Scandinavian research environment and they have crucially influenced epidemiological studies (Bauer 2014). 

 After the 1945 census, the ethnicity of population groups ceased to be recorded in Swedish national statistics. In the absence of ethnic markers in registers, epidemiologists have had to employ alternative concepts, strategies, and techniques to study minority health. The purpose of the paper is to explore the classifications and population categories that epidemiologists in a Swedish context have employed instead of ethnicity.

 The studied period, 1950-2020, is marked by some key changes that both carry explanatory potential and serve as a backdrop. Since the post-war years, epidemiological focus has shifted recurrently while, at the same time, information technology in biomedicine has become ubiquitous. In Sweden, ambitious programs in the fields of public health, education, and housing have been launched, criticized and subsequently partially dismantled. The Swedish population has diversified due to labour and, later, refugee immigration. All the while, the health gap between the majority population and minorities has increased. The paper will relate the epidemiological knowledge production regarding minority health to these societal and demographic changes.