MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit
This research unit was formed in 1998 from the merger of the Medical Research Council's Medical Sociology Unit and the Chief Scientist Office’s Public Health Research Unit. It is core funded by the MRC and the CSO, and receives additional research grants from a number of organisations. On the first of June 2013 the unit formally became part of the Institute of Health and Wellbeing, University of Glasgow.
The aim of the Unit is to promote human health by the study of social and environmental influences on health. It has three objectives:
- To study how people’s social positions, and their social and physical environments, influence their physical and mental health and capacity to lead healthy lives;
- To design and evaluate interventions aiming to improve public health and reduce social inequalities in health; and
- To influence policy and practice by communicating results and implications of research to policy, professional and lay audiences.
Staff and students come from a range of social and public health science disciplines including statistics, mathematics, epidemiology, public health medicine, nursing, natural sciences, human sciences, nutrition, sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, geography, and history. The unit has particular expertise in the analysis of routine, NHS, data; the design, conduct and analysis of population health surveys including the collection of biomarkers; content analysis of media coverage of health stories; qualitative and ethnographic methods of data collection; systematic reviews of non-healthcare interventions; the evaluation of "natural “ experiments such as government policy initiatives; and the development, piloting, implementation and evaluation of community-based health interventions.
The Unit currently has nine research programmes:
- Children, Young People, Families and Health (programme leader Professor Danny Wight)
- Ethnicity and Health (programme leader Professor Seeromanie Harding)
- Evaluating the health effects of social interventions (acting programme leader Dr Matt Egan)
- Gender and Health (Programme leader Professor Kate Hunt)
- Measuring Health (programme leader professor Alastair Leyland)
- Neighbourhoods and health (programme leader Professor Anne Ellaway)
- Sexual Health (programme leader Dr Lisa McDaid)
- Social Patterning of Health across the Lifecourse (acting programme leader Dr Frank Popham)
- Understandings and Uses of Public Health Research (programme leader Dr Shona Hilton).
For details of significant current major projects and recent publication, see our annual report for 2012, http://www.gla.ac.uk/sphsu/sphsu-ar-2012.pdf.