The Burden of Stigma on Health and Wellbeing: A Taxonomy of Concealment, Course, Disruptiveness, Aesthetics, Origin, and Peril across 93 Stigmas

Abstract

Most individuals are stigmatized at some point. However, research often examines stigmas separately, thus underestimating the overall impact of stigma and precluding comparisons across stigmatized identities and conditions. In their classic text, Social Stigma: The Psychology of Marked Relationships, Edward Jones and colleagues laid the groundwork for unifying the study of different stigmas by considering the shared dimensional features of stigmas: aesthetics, concealability, course, disruptiveness, origin, peril. Despite the prominence of this framework, no study has documented the extent to which stigmas differ along these dimensions, and the implications of this variation for health and wellbeing. We reinvigorated this framework to spur a comprehensive account of stigma’s impact by classifying 93 stigmas along these dimensions. With the input of expert and general public raters, we located these stigmas in a six-dimensional space and created discrete clusters organized around these dimensions. We then linked this taxonomy to health and stigma-related mechanisms. This quantitative taxonomy offers insights into understanding the relationship between stigma and health.