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Pathways from social and economic experience to health behavior and outcomes
This lecture builds on the theoretical and historical foundations laid in the lecture and course work for “Overview of Social Determinants of Health” to expand the students’ capacity to plan and execute studies identifying and quantifying pathways from social and economic experience to health behavior and outcomes. The session will provide practical examples of how the available variables can be used to operationalize different aspects of social and economic concepts at the level of the
- Individual (e.g., school attendance, school grade attainment, employment, migration, and household and sexual relationships)
- Household (e.g., household assets, wealth, expenditures, geographical location, household migration history)
- Community (e.g., availability of infrastructure, exposure to a structural health intervention)
- The session will introduce the students to a range of quantitative approaches to identify causal pathways using longitudinal, linked, population-based Health and Demographic Surveillance (HDSS) data, and provide the student with readings for further in-depth study of specific approaches, including
- Opportunities for quasi-experiments in HDSS data
- Opportunities for experiments in HDSS data
- Analytical approaches in the absence of experimental or quasi-experimental assignment of social and economic exposures
- The session will further discuss a range of real-life practical issues that are likely to arise in working with HDSS data in establishing causal pathways from social and economic experiences to health behavior and outcomes – missing data, biases (e.g., social desirability biases), and inferential fallacies (e.g., ecological fallacies) – and possible approaches to address these issues
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