Incorporating genetic data to better understand the social and environmental drivers of children's outcomes

该研究金包含一个跨学科的量化研究方案，以考察家庭和邻里环境对儿童健康和社会结果的影响。它使用布里斯托尔出生于20世纪90年代初的S儿童队列的数据来调查早期地理搬迁等社会因素是如何与心理健康和大麻使用等结果相关的。这一奖学金将调查如何克服基于人群的健康研究常见的统计限制；研究经常受到未被观察到的人之间的潜在差异(如家族史、个性差异或遗传学)的偏见。新的统计方法可以用来调查潜在差异的影响，即使在这些差异无法测量的情况下，也可以提供一个很好的工具来确定社会因素和健康之间的关系是否可能是由于潜在的因果因素，或者它们是否由于数据中的相关性结构而产生。为了进一步了解人与人之间的未测量差异可能影响健康结果的方式，我将调查在社会科学研究中揭示的关联可能在多大程度上建立在个人之间的遗传差异之上。例如，有一个大麻使用的遗传结构，这有助于解释为什么有些人比其他人更有可能是吸毒者，而且这种“隐藏的”基因结构可能会影响到社会环境和大麻使用之间的联系。该奖学金将对此进行研究，并寻求进一步了解遗传学如何对复杂的健康和社会结果做出贡献。

This fellowship contains an interdisciplinary programme of quantitative research to examine the impact that home and neighbourhood environments have on children's health and social outcomes. It uses data from a Bristol based cohort of children born in the early 1990's to investigate how social factors such as geographical relocation in early life relate outcomes including mental health and cannabis use.This fellowship will investigate ways to overcome a statistical limitation common to population-based health research; that studies are often biased by underlying differences between people that are not observed (such as family history, personality differences or genetics). Novel statistical methods can be used to investigate the impact of underlying differences even where they are unmeasured, and provide an excellent tool for determining whether relationships between social factors and health may be due to potential causal factors or if they arise due to correlation structures within the data.To further understanding of the ways in which unmeasured differences between people may impacts health outcomes, I will investigate the extent to which genetic differences between individuals may underlie the associations revealed in social science research. For example, there is a genetic architecture to cannabis use that helps to explain why some people are more likely to be users than others, and it is possible that this 'hidden' genetic architecture influences the links observed between social environments and cannabis use. This fellowship will examine this and seek to further knowledge on the way in which genetics contribute towards complex health and social outcomes.