PATHWAYS

The PATHWAYS research project is a node of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) and is based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

PATHWAYS aims to identify pathways that link socio-demographic circumstances and biological disadvantage to adult health, and parental family and socio-economic circumstances to infant mortality, with a particular emphasis on the mediating factors that lie on these pathways.

PATHWAYS research projects include:

pathways to and from particular fertility histories and their implications for later life health;
pathways to and from marital status trajectories and health in mid life;
pathways from parental socio-economic and demographic circumstance to birth weight of infants and infant mortality; and
use of genes as instrumental variables in causal analysis.

The methodological focus of this node is the development and dissemination of rigorous approaches for the identification of these pathways.

The substantive and methodological strands aim to enhance the ability of the social science community to investigate specific hypotheses and therefore design public health interventions, and also to promote methodological exchange between the social and biomedical research communities.

In addition to research projects PATHWAYS runs training courses and develops web-based materials.