SDG Detail

P8471Social Epidemiology

Postgraduate course

Project description

This course focuses on the branch of epidemiology concerned with how social arrangements, processes, and interactions shape the population distribution of health and disease and produce social inequalities in health. The sub-discipline of social epidemiology has grown dramatically in the past decade and, while still evolving as an interdisciplinary enterprise, it is now an established field of etiologic inquiry, both incorporating and influencing the conventional theories, methods, and principles of epidemiology. This course will familiarize students with the key theories, concepts, methods, findings, and ongoing debates in social epidemiology. Through lectures, readings, and discussion we will review the major social determinants of health, the theories and empirical evidence with respect to how social conditions �get under the skin,� and the methodological challenges involved in measuring social phenomena and making causal inferences about the relationship between social factors and health. By the end of the course students will understand the theoretical, substantive, and methodological parameters of this growing sub-discipline of epidemiologic inquiry, and be able to evaluate both its strengths and limitations.