Axis director: Dr. Amélie Petitclerc, Université Laval

Social inequalities in health are increasing, in Quebec and elsewhere, partly because the social determinants of health are reproduced from generation to generation. The Axis will enable the network to raise awareness of the importance of the social context in which perinatal reproduction and development take place, and to integrate the best measures of this social context into structuring interdisciplinary projects.
Objectives :
1) Bring together social science researchers to identify the key variables to measure, the best instruments, and the methods of analysis to better understand the complexity of the social determinants of health;
2) promote the integration of these measures into large-scale interdisciplinary projects to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying the effects of social determinants;
3) support structuring initiatives (e.g. large-scale longitudinal studies) that enable us to characterize populations followed from the periconceptional and perinatal periods through to the child’s first years of life, and to study intergenerational transmission mechanisms.