Social drivers of health

To make a point, the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright (1997) once borrowed a character from the 1960s comic strip Lil’ Abner: a big blobby… More

Disparities in health often arise due to unfair or unjust social arrangements making them inequities. These social arrangements are codified through structures—laws, policies, regulations, practices, and norms. More

The number of older Americans who are food insecure is growing, yet a recent Trump administration decision to terminate data collection of the annual Food Security Supplement will make it impossible to fully track this growth. More

We broaden our understanding of community power by going beyond traditional measures of voting and voting rights. Our objectives are to (1) create county-level measures of community power that are more expansive than voting and (2) explore the descriptive and geographic patterns of community power. More

The United States lags far behind other comparable nations on health indicators. To promote population health in cities, we argue for the right to Universal Basic Neighborhoods (UBN). More

In July 2021, to alleviate material hardship, Congress temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC), one of the largest income transfer programs in the United States. Prior research has linked the expansion to improvements in material hardship, food insecurity, and parental mental health. This study is among the first to examine its association with child well-being. More

nsider the story of John Miller, a fictionalized Chicagoan, who lives with a serious mental illness and co-occurring addiction disorders. He recently left a psychiatric inpatient facility.  Estranged from his family, Mr. Miller was on the verge of becoming street homeless. More

Despite spending more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, the United States experiences declining life expectancy and increasing chronic disease burden—a paradox reflecting fundamental limitations in the current treatment-centered, facility-based care system. This paper introduces Neighborhood Nursing, an innovative universal care infrastructure designed to shift the US healthcare toward proactive, prevention-centered care organized geographically in neighborhoods. More

Cross-sector collaborations among health care and housing services organizations promise more efficient use of resources and delivery of more coherent and effective services to people experiencing homelessness (PEH). More

Since the day Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States, his administration has “flooded the zone” with a deluge of… More