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定量研究方案，以审查家庭和邻里环境对儿童健康和社会结果的影响。它使用了来自布里斯托尔的一组90年代初出生的儿童的数据，以调查早期生活中的地理迁移等社会因素如何与心理健康和大麻使用等结果相关。该研究金将调查克服基于人群的健康研究中常见的统计限制的方法；这些研究往往因人们之间未被观察到的潜在差异（如家族史、性格差异或基因）而存在偏见。新的统计方法可用于调查潜在差异的影响，即使这些差异是无法测量的，并为确定社会因素与健康之间的关系是由于潜在的因果因素还是由于数据中的相关结构而产生提供了极好的工具。为了进一步了解人与人之间无法测量的差异可能影响健康结果的方式，我将调查个体之间的遗传差异可能在多大程度上构成社会科学研究中揭示的关联的基础。例如，大麻使用的遗传结构有助于解释为什么有些人比其他人更有可能成为使用者，并且这种“隐藏的”遗传结构可能影响观察到的社会环境与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对复杂健康和社会结果的贡献方式。

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.