Social Determinants of Population Health: A Systems Sciences Approach

Population distributions of health emerge from the complex interplay of health-related factors at multiple levels, from the biological to the societal level. Individuals are aggregated within social networks, affected by their locations, and influenced differently across time. From aggregations of individuals, group properties can emerge, including some exposures that are ubiquitous within populations but variant across populations. By combining a focus on social determinants of health with a conceptual framework for understanding how genetics, biology, behavior, psychology, society, and environment interact, a systems science approach can inform our understanding of the underlying causes of the unequal distribution of health across generations and populations, and can help us identify promising approaches to reduce such inequalities. In this paper, we discuss how systems science approaches have already made several substantive and methodological contributions to the study of population health from a social epidemiology perspective.