Approved research

Social environments, social relationships, human genomics and health and other social outcomes

Lay summary

This project aims at understanding how social environment and human genomic influence several human outcomes. We are particularly interested in two sets of outcomes. The first is health-related which includes obesity, high blood pressure, substance use, and other risky behaviors. The second set of outcomes is attainment-related including educational attainment, academic achievement, intellectual development, and occupational status. In our statistical analysis predicting the outcomes, we plan to include the following predictors: genomic measures, social influences (including socioeconomic status of self and parents, community and neighborhood characteristics, school characteristics, cohort and period differences, and other family characteristics), and social relationships (including connections and relationship qualities among peers, friends, relatives, spouses, and partners). We expect that both genomic and social measures will have impact on the health and attainment outcomes. In addition, we also expect to demonstrate the impacts of gene-environment interaction on the outcomes. Our study can therefore provide insights to the public health and social science fields by integrating social factors and genomics to explain the important social and health outcomes.