Social Environment & Health
Project Summary
Since its inception in the early 1960s, the Social Environment and Health Program (SEH) has been a leader in the development of theory and research on the major role of psychosocial factors in the etiology and course of both mental and physical health and illness. Founded as a cross-disciplinary program, the program has been home to The Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL) study for over thirty years, which is the oldest ongoing nationally representative longitudinal study of the role of a broad range of social, psychological, and behavioral factors in health and the way health changes with age over the adult life course. Visit the ACL website for more information.
Today, SEH maintains the foundational tenet that health is socially determined by the confluence of factors at the individual, environmental, and societal level over the adult life course. We specialize in integrating knowledge from across multiple disciplines and using innovative & cutting-edge methods to characterize the social and environmental contexts in which people live their lives. Our interdisciplinary faculty includes social, environmental, psychiatric, and infectious disease epidemiologists, as well as gerontologists, climate scientists, and experts in human-centered design. Our work examines interrelated contextual exposures such as the residential neighborhood social and built environment, climate events, housing conditions, and the contexts that shape the distribution of infectious pathogens and their consequences. We do this work with particular attention to issues of health equity. We examine a broad range of health and behavioral outcomes including cognitive function, disability, musculoskeletal health, serious mental illness, sleep, and housing instability. We also interrogate the factors & processes that may link or modify the relation between the environment and these health & behavioral outcomes, including biomarkers of premature aging and housing modifications.
Investigators
Philippa J Clarke, Natalie Colabianchi, Carina Gronlund, Margaret Takako Hicken, James S House, Jeffrey D Morenoff, Grace Noppert, Richard H Price, Kimberly Rollings, Marilyn Sinkewicz