Full Citation
Title: Commentary Advancing the Social Epidemiology Mission of the American Journal of Epidemiology
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2022
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwab277
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Abstract: Social epidemiology is concerned with how social forces inf luence population health. Rather than focusing on a single disease (as in cancer or cardiovascular epidemiology) or a single type of exposure (e.g., nutritional epidemiology), social epidemiology encompasses all the social and economic determinants of health, both historical and contemporary. These include features of social and physical environments, the network of relationships in a society, and the institutions, politics, policies, norms and cultures that shape all of these forces. This commentary presents the perspective of several editors at the Journal with expertise in social epidemiology. We articulate our thinking to encourage submissions to the Journal that: 1) expand knowledge of emerging and underresearched social determinants of population health; 2) advance new empirical evidence on the determinants of health inequities and solutions to advance health equity; 3) generate evidence to inform the translation of research on social determinants of health into public health impact; 4) contribute to innovation in methods to improve the rigor and relevance of social epidemiology; and 5) encourage critical self-ref lection on the direction, challenges, successes, and failures of the field. future; population health; social epidemiology Abbreviation: COVID-19, coronavirus disease 2019. Editor's note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Journal of Epidemiology. Social epidemiology is concerned with the influence of social forces on population health and health equity. In contrast to a disease focus (e.g., cancer or cardiovascular epidemiology) or a focus on a single type of exposure (e.g., nutritional epidemiology), social epidemiology encompasses both historical and contemporary social and economic determinants of health. These determinants include features of social and physical environments, networks of relationships in a society, and the institutions, politics, policies, norms and cultures that shape them. The American Journal of Epidemiology has a history of publishing groundbreaking studies within social epidemiology that spawned new fields of inquiry; for example, the contribution of the social environment to host resistance (1), the association of social networks with population health (2), the influence of neighborhood contexts on health (3, 4), and the use of natural experiments to shed new light on old questions. The Journal has also engaged actively with the ongoing challenges and debates in our discipline: debates that have served to refine our own mission within the field (5-10), debates on theories and methods (11, 12), and debates about questions raised by social epidemiologists that have broad impact-most recently, whether the potential outcomes approach to causation is inherently conservative and inimical to the radical social change needed to address social injustice (13-17). In the two decades following the publication of the textbook Social Epidemiology (18), we have witnessed exponential growth in the output of researchers who call themselves 557
Url: https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwab277
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Authors: Gilman, Stephen E; Aiello, Allison; Galea, Sandro; Howe, Chanelle J; Kawachi, Ichiro; Lovasi, Gina S; Dean, Lorraine T; Oakes, J Michael; Siddiqi, Arjumand; Glymour, M Maria
Periodical (Full): American Journal of Epidemiology
Issue: 4
Volume: 191
Pages: 557-560
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