FOR 2723: Understanding the institutional context of health inequalities among young people. A life stage approach

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The health of young people is strongly linked to their socioeconomic background. While the descriptive evidence of health inequalities among children and adolescents is convincing, the underlying mechanisms have been far less explored. The best, though incomplete, evidence exists for individual-level factors which mediate the relationship between socioeconomic circumstances and health. Only little is known about explanatory factors at contextual level. For example, characteristics of institutional contexts in terms of size, composition, infrastructure, type and quality are likely to shape socioeconomic inequalities in health among young people above and beyond individual-level determinants. Thus, combined evidence on possible drivers of socioeconomic inequalities in health both at the individual and the contextual level is needed to elucidate health inequalities at younger ages and help to design effective multilevel interventions to tackle these inequalities.The aim of the research unit is to substantially improve the understanding of the development of health inequalities at younger ages. Bringing together teams from various research backgrounds, the unit will create a cluster of excellence that allows to address the complexity of this research topic. We will explicitly go beyond previous research attempts by a) applying a strict life stage approach that considers the particularities of the different life stages from birth to early adulthood and b) focussing on the interplay between young people and the institutional contexts in which they act. The general research objectives are:1) To systematically review existing international evidence on the impact of different institutional contexts on health in general and on socioeconomic inequalities in health in particular from childhood to early adulthood. 2) To empirically study whether and how characteristics of different institutional contexts in Germany are associated with the emergence of individual-level inequalities in health.3) To integrate findings from the different subprojects into a single and comprehensive theoretical model about the key mechanisms at individual and contextual levels.Building upon reviews of the existing evidence, the research unit will mainly analyse secondary data in the first funding period. The subprojects will focus on the contexts that serve as major socialisation agents in society, such as the family, kindergarten, school, tertiary education/work as well as the health care system, which plays a key role for a healthy development. The project combines explanatory factors and mechanisms at different levels of analysis and takes into account the specific explanations at the different life stages and institutional contexts. The research unit will substantially contribute to the implementation of an interdisciplinary multilevel perspective on health inequalities across the life course at the interface of sociology, social epidemiology and public health.