Family Contexts, Physiological Stress and Health in Children

描述(申请人提供)：最近的研究表明，慢性早期生活压力可能对儿童的健康构成严重威胁，并使个人在成年后走上更多身体和精神健康问题的道路。慢性压力除了是贯穿整个生命过程的一项关键健康投入外，还通过个人对其环境的反应而产生，从而反映了社会背景与生物过程的相互作用。改善人口健康和缩小健康差距需要我们了解这些社会-生物相互作用，特别是在生命过程的早期阶段，在这一阶段，生理变化可能成为生物学上的基础。K01人口研究指导科学家发展奖通过提出培训计划和研究议程来满足这一关键的研究需求，该计划和研究议程将建立在我的社会学、家庭人口学和儿童健康背景的基础上，以成为社会背景、慢性压力和儿童时期健康领域的独立、创新的研究人员。为了实现这一目标，我建议在压力生物学、压力生物标记物的收集和分析、儿童发展和多层次建模方面进行正式的培训和指导。我的高素质导师团队和咨询委员会成员来自社会学、人口学、流行病学、护理和心理学领域，反映了在进行整合生物和社会过程的研究时需要多学科方法。我将利用我在这些新领域的培训和指导来回答重要的研究问题，即家庭环境如何与儿童的慢性压力相关，以及慢性压力对儿童的影响 美国的儿童健康和健康差距。在过去的40年里，儿童的家庭环境发生了巨大而普遍的转变，转向未婚和不稳定的父母结合，这往往伴随着社会经济上的不利条件。研究表明，这些情况助长了儿童健康和发展方面的不利因素，并导致社会不平等代代相传。然而，很少有人关注评估慢性压力作为家庭环境影响儿童健康的途径。这个项目的预期结果是范式转换研究，将生物学机制纳入我们的概念化，并对家庭背景对儿童福祉的影响进行实证测试。重要的是，结论将超越已婚和未婚母亲家庭的比较，考虑不同的家庭结构和过程，因为它们影响孩子的压力和健康。使用多层次和以人口为基础的数据将促进我们对更大的社会背景(即社区和社会地位)对这些过程的影响的理解，并将提供可概括的结果。这些是儿童健康、家庭人口学和压力研究的关键下一步，将为未来旨在减少儿童长期压力和健康差距的研究和政策制定奠定基础。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent research suggests that chronic early life stress may pose serious threats to child well-being and set individuals on pathways towards increased physical and mental health problems in adulthood. In addition to being a key health input across the life course, chronic stress is produced through individuals' responses to their environments and thus reflects the interaction of social contexts with biological processes. Improving population health and reducing health disparities necessitates that we understand these socio-biological interactions, particularly during the early stages of the life course when physiological changes may become biologically embedded. This K01 Mentored Research Scientist Development Award in Population Research application addresses this critical research need by proposing a training plan and research agenda that will build on my sociology, family demography and child health background to become an independent, innovative researcher in the area of social contexts, chronic stress and health during childhood. To achieve this goal, I propose formal training and mentoring in the biology of stress, collection and analysi of stress biomarkers, child development, and multilevel modeling. My highly-qualified team of mentors and advisory committee members come from the fields of sociology, demography, epidemiology, nursing, and psychology, reflecting the need for a multi- disciplinary approach in conducting research that integrates biological and social processes. I will use my training and mentoring in these new areas to answer important research questions about how family contexts are associated with chronic stress in children, and the implications of chronic stress for child health and health disparities in the U.S. In the past four decades, there have been large and pervasive shifts in children's family contexts towards unmarried and unstable parental unions, which are often accompanied by socioeconomic disadvantage. Research suggests that these contexts contribute to child health and development disadvantages and the reproduction of social inequalities across generations. However, there has been little attention to assessing chronic stress as a pathway through which family contexts affect child health. The expected outcome of this project is paradigm-shifting research that incorporates biological mechanisms into our conceptualization and empirical tests of family context effects on child well-being. Importantly, the conclusions will go beyond a comparison of married vs. unmarried mother families to consider diverse family structures and processes as they impact child stress and health. Using multilevel and population-based data will advance our understanding of the influence of larger social contexts (i.e., neighborhoods and social status) on these processes and will provide generalizable results. These are critical next steps in child health, family demography, and stress research that will set the stage for future research and policy development aimed at reducing chronic stress and health disparities in children.