Grant: Operating Grant: Advancing Theoretical & Methodological Innovations in Hlth Res

The environment we live in has an impact on our health. As chronic conditions are increasingly affecting our population, a number of researchers think that environmental conditions to which we are exposed to in our daily life contribute to this growing burden. Consequently, there is a need to develop valid and reliable measures of how people get exposed to these unhealthy places. Too often, research only considers the residential neighborhood as a location where environmental influences are experienced. There is a need to extend this notion and develop new computer tools for health studies and surveys that will provide valid and reliable information on the places people are exposed to. This information will be very useful in depicting a more precise picture of the environments we get exposed to which impact on our health. The measurement tools we will develop will be applied in the context of an important study on social health inequalities and cardiovascular health that currently follows 7300 individuals in the Paris Metropolitan area, France. By collecting detailed information on the places where people go to, we will be able to better estimate how residential and nonresidential environmental factors contribute to their health, and to the existence of social inequalities in health.