Pathways to Health

This book presents a rigorous enquiry into life course processes that are thought to influence health, integrating the latest methodologies for the study of pathways that link socio-demographic circumstances to health with an emphasis on the mediating factors that lie on these pathways.

Primarily intended for DNP and PhD students in nursing and health care who are expected to design research to identify health-related problems and solutions, this book focuses on the concepts, theories and processes of how social determinants affect the health of populations. Using specific social determinants as an organizing framework, it presents ample scientific evidence from health and social disciplines of the universal processes that produce the social patterning of health inequities.

This volume focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome. The book seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health.