Multisector Collaboration vs. Social Democracy for Addressing Social Determinants of Health.

Policy Points Multisector collaboration, the dominant approach for responding to health harms created by adverse social conditions, involves collaboration among health care insurers, health care systems, and social services organizations. Social democracy, an underused alternative, seeks to use government policy to shape the civil (e.g., civil rights), political (e.g., voting rights), and economic (e.g., labor market institutions, property rights, and the tax-and-transfer system) institutions that produce health. Multisector collaboration may not achieve its goals, both because the collaborations are difficult to accomplish and because it does not seek to transform social conditions, only to mitigate their harms. Social democracy requires political contestation but has greater potential to improve population health and health equity.

The Effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit on Physical and Mental health-Results from the Atlanta Paycheck Plus Experiment.

Policy Points The Paycheck Plus randomized controlled trial tested a fourfold increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for single adults without dependent children over 3 years in New York and Atlanta. In New York, the intervention improved economic, mental, and physical health outcomes. In Atlanta, it had no economic benefit or impact on physical health and may have worsened mental health. In Atlanta, tax filing and bonus receipt were lower than in the New York arm of the trial, which may explain the lack of economic benefits. Lower mental health scores in the treatment group were driven by disadvantaged men, and the study sample was in good mental health. CONTEXT: The Paycheck Plus experiment examined the effects of an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for single adults on economic and health outcomes in Atlanta, GA and New York City (NYC). The NYC study was completed two years prior to the Atlanta study and found mental and physical benefits for the subgroups that responded best to the economic incentives provided. In this article, we present the findings from the Atlanta study, in which the uptake of the treatment (tax filings and EITC bonus) were lower and economic and health benefits were not observed. METHODS: Paycheck Plus Atlanta was an unblinded randomized controlled trial that assigned n = 3,971 participants to either the standard federal EITC (control group) or an EITC supplement of up to $2,000 (treatment group) for three tax years (2017-2019). Administrative data on employment and earnings were obtained from the Georgia Department of Labor and survey data were used to examine validated measures of health and well-being. FINDINGS: In Atlanta, the treatment group had significantly higher earnings in the first project year but did not have significantly higher cumulative earnings than the control group overall (mean difference = $1,812, 95% CI = -150, 3,774, p = 0.07). The treatment group also had significantly lower scores on two measures of mental health after the intervention was complete: the Patient Health Questionnaire 8 (mean difference = 0.19, 95% CI = 0.06, 0.32, p = 0.005) and the Kessler 6 (mean difference = 0.15, 95% CI = 0.03, 0.27, p = 0.012). Secondary analyses suggested these results were driven by disadvantaged men, but the study sample was in good mental health. CONCLUSIONS: The EITC experiment in Atlanta was not associated with gains in earnings or improvements in physical or mental health.

The Role of Single Motherhood in America's High Child Poverty.

Many claim a high prevalence of single motherhood plays a significant role in America's high child poverty. Using the Luxembourg Income Study, we compare the "prevalences and penalties" for child poverty across 30 rich democracies and within the United States over time (1979-2019). Several descriptive patterns contradict the importance of single motherhood. The U.S. prevalence of single motherhood is cross-nationally moderate and typical and is historically stable. Also, child poverty and the prevalence of single motherhood have trended in opposite directions in recent decades in the United States. More important than the prevalence of single motherhood, the United States stands out for having the highest penalty across 30 rich democracies. Counterfactual simulations demonstrate that reducing single motherhood would not substantially reduce child poverty. Even if there was zero single motherhood, (1) the United States would not change from having the fourth-highest child poverty rate, (2) the 41-year trend in child poverty would be very similar, and (3) the extreme racial inequalities in child poverty would not decline. Rather than the prevalence of single motherhood, the high penalty for single motherhood and extremely high Black and Latino child poverty rates, which exist regardless of single motherhood, are far more important to America's high child poverty.

Making un/equal: reassessing inequality and mental health through a praxeographic approach on welfare categorization processes.

PURPOSE: In recent decades, Europe has seen a steady increase in psychiatric diagnoses, which, besides affecting the population in many ways, also challenges the organization of welfare. This paper explores how welfare classification processes impact the contemporary production of mental (ill) health and social inequality in the German welfare state. METHODS: Based on comprehensive ethnographic research in the public mental healthcare landscape in Berlin between 2011 and 2017, this paper discusses in detail the case of a mandatory prescription of a psychosocial rehabilitation measure for Ms Reisch, a psychiatric service user and ethnographic research partner. The analysis draws on the methodological approach of praxeography to examine how this case challenges the social determinants of mental health framework and the conceptual work of the sociology of inequality on which the categories of welfare are largely built. RESULTS: The paper highlights the essentializing properties of social categories, whether in the sociology of inequality or in social and mental health policy. It also demonstrates the strength of praxeography to expose how multiple welfare categorization processes shape experiences and events of dis/ability in practice, potentially contradicting the stated intentions of social policy. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that the attachment of categories to people in public welfare needs to be changed to make public administration more flexible to responding to the situated processes that bring about differentiations of equal and unequal in practice. The paper, therefore, encourages social inquiry into the potentialities of a post-categorical social policy framework.

Evaluation of Active Labor Market Policy Reform: Employment Outcomes of Vocational Rehabilitation Services.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the Estonian active labor market reform in 2016, which introduced a new policy concerning vocational rehabilitation services. As a research question, we investigate how such services may have affected the employment outcomes of people with mental and/or physical impairments. METHODS: Our sample includes 9244 people from 2016 to 2020, with a mean age of 46 years. Due to multiple entries to the services, we have more than 11,000 cases with over 100,000 monthly observations. We use propensity score matching in combination with fixed effects panel regressions to analyze how the completion of the scheduled rehabilitation plan affected monthly employment duration. RESULTS: Our findings indicate that completing the rehabilitation service results on average in 2.6 months longer post-rehabilitation employment, compared to matched individuals who discontinued the service. This effect was larger when already employed and male participants entered the service, while weaker effects were observed in the case of individuals with only mental disabilities. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, we conclude that while completing the scheduled rehabilitation plan has a positive effect on employment outcomes, still maintaining employment status seems to remain a challenge, based on the relatively modest effect sizes. Thus, we question the economic arguments behind the reform.

Perpetration-Focused Prevention: The Perceptions of Victim-Survivors.

Policymakers are increasingly calling on victim-survivors of child sexual abuse to consult on prevention initiatives, including perpetration-focused prevention efforts like Stop it Now! However, very little is known about the perspectives of victim-survivors on perpetration-focused prevention and whether they support such initiatives. This study was informed by the research question: How do victim-survivors of child sexual abuse perceive perpetration-focused prevention, including the Stop it Now! program? Sixteen Australian victim-survivors participated in an individual, one-hour interview and the data were analysed according to thematic analysis. Four themes emerged through the data analysis: Core of repulsion; Doubt and dismissal; Conditions for congruence; and Arriving at acceptability. These themes are represented as a spiral from the first theme at the centre to the last at the outer edge, reflecting a process of rationalisation. Their initial reaction was a sense of revulsion to perpetration-focused prevention, but their final position was one of conditional support.

Transitioning to adulthood: Are conventional benchmarks as protective today as they were in the past?

More young adults in the United States are studying beyond high school and working full-time than in the past, yet young adults continue to have high poverty rates as they transition to adulthood. This study uses longitudinal data on two cohorts of young adults from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth to assess whether conventional benchmarks associated with economic success-gaining an education, finding stable employment, and delaying childbirth until after marriage-are as predictive of reduced poverty today as they were in the past. We also explore differences in the protective effect of the benchmarks by race/ethnicity, gender, and poverty status while young. We find that, on average, the benchmarks associated with economic success are as predictive of reduced poverty among young adults today as they were for the prior generation; however, demographics and features of the economy have contributed to higher poverty rates among today's young adults.

[The loneliness barometer 2024: methodology and selected results]. / Einsamkeitsbarometer 2024: Methodik und ausgewählte Ergebnisse.

Loneliness is a relatively new topic in the field of health and social policy. A pivotal requirement for the formulation of effective policies addressing loneliness in Germany lies in the access to comprehensive, longitudinal data.In 2024, the first "Loneliness Barometer" was conducted by the Loneliness Network Germany (KNE) at the Institute for Social Work and Social Pedagogy e. V. (ISS e. V.) on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ). It is a report on the long-term development of loneliness within the German population (18 years and older), for which representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, 1992-2021) were analysed. The loneliness barometer is also intended to provide evidence-based statements on the long-term development of loneliness burdens in Germany in the future.This article provides an insight into the decisions made in the development of the Loneliness Barometer methodology and presents selected key findings from the first Loneliness Barometer. Leveraging data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), the Loneliness Barometer underscores the multifaceted disparities faced by individuals grappling with heightened loneliness levels. These disparities manifest across various domains: diminished health outcomes, constrained social and financial resources encompassing education and employment, reduced economic participation, curtailed political engagement and heightened scepticism towards democratic institutions. The article concludes with considerations of the limitations and future development possibilities of the Loneliness Barometer.

Marital status, State policy environment and Foregone healthcare of same-sex families during the COVID-19 period.

Sexual minorities in the United States have often reported a higher likelihood of forgoing healthcare than heterosexuals, but whether this occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic remains underexplored. This study applies and extends the Andersen model to examine different-sex and same-sex families' likelihood of forgoing healthcare during the pandemic using nationally representative data from the 2020 (May-October) Current Population Survey (N = 139,636). Results are that during the early stage of the pandemic (1) same-sex families overall are more likely than different-sex families to forgo medical care, (2) cohabitating same-sex families were less likely to forgo healthcare than their married counterparts, and (3) state policy environments will moderate only some of the differences in healthcare utilization by family types. Findings provide partial support for hypotheses and suggest a more careful consideration of the role of partnership and state policy in the Andersen model. Policy implications are also discussed.

Debate: Social media content moderation may do more harm than good for youth mental health.

Most social media platforms censor and moderate content related to mental illness to protect users from harm, though this may be at the expense of potential positive outcomes for youth mental health. Current evidence does not offer strong support for the relationship between censoring mental health content and preventing harm. In fact, existing moderation strategies can perpetuate negative consequences for mental health by creating isolated and polarized communities where at-risk youth remain exposed to harmful content, such as pro-eating disorder communities that use lexical variants to evade censorship. Social media censorship of content related to mental illness can also silence positive discourse about mental health, create barriers to accessing online support and resources, and hinder research efforts on youth well-being. Social media content about mental health can have important positive impacts on youth mental health by facilitating help-seeking, depicting positive coping strategies, and promoting a sense of belonging for struggling youth, but these benefits are minimized under existing moderation and censorship practices. This article presents a call to action for evidence-based social media policies and for practitioners to consider the clinical implications of social media engagement when connecting with young patients.

Can Social Policy Alleviate Loneliness Among Older Adults? A Comparative Analysis of OECD Countries.

Loneliness in old age is a multifaceted issue influenced by personal, social, and environmental factors, necessitating a holistic approach. However, most research has predominantly focused on individual-level risk factors, with limited attention given to institutional factors such as social policy. This study investigated how social policies impact loneliness among older adults. Multi-level analysis was conducted using data from the 2017 wave of International Social Survey Programme, involving 6,337 older adults from 23 OECD countries. The analysis revealed that higher public spending on welfare and old-age pensions significantly reduces the likelihood of loneliness among older adults. These findings confirm the protective role of generous social policies in addressing old-age loneliness. They underscore the need for long-term changes in welfare systems to enhance the public response to the significant social risk posed by old-age loneliness.

The State of Family Caregiving Policy.

As the population ages and supportive services are increasingly delivered in home- and community-based settings, greater demands are placed on family caregivers. This essay introducing the special issue of the Journal of Aging and Social Policy discusses signs of progress on policies to ease the burden on family caregivers. It introduces a series of articles that reflect the growing body of research on caregiver-related policy actions. These actions range from expanding access to paid family leave and payment for providing care, to ensuring access to better data about family caregivers and improving the post- hospital discharge experiences of rural and underserved caregivers. It also explores a major conundrum around caregiving policy - why progress on family caregiving policy has been so slow, despite its clear importance to the health and welfare of those who receive supports, as well as to those providing supports. In addition, the essay discusses developments, such as Biden administration actions and the RAISE Family Caregiver Advisory Council, indicating that the political dynamic around caregiving has changed, concluding that this is a uniquely hopeful time for family caregiver-related policy.

Producing Change to Understand the Social Determinants of Health: The Promise of Experiments for Social Epidemiology.

In this commentary, invited for the 100th anniversary of the Journal, we discuss the addition of randomized experiments, along with natural experiments that emulate randomized trials using observational data, as designs in the social epidemiologist's toolbox. These approaches transform the way we define and ask questions about social exposures. They compel us to ask questions about how well-defined interventions change a social exposure that might lead to changes in health. As such, experiments are of unique public health and policy significance. We argue that they are a powerful approach to advance our understanding of how well-defined changes in social exposures impact health, and how credible social policy reforms may be instrumental to address health inequalities. We focus on two research designs. The first is a "pure" randomized controlled trial (RCT) in which the investigator defines and randomly assigns the intervention. The second is a natural experiment, which exploits the fact that policies or interventions in the real world often involve an element of random assignment, emulating an RCT. To give the reader our bottom line: While acknowledging their limits, we continue to be very excited about the promise of RCTs and natural experiments to advance social epidemiology.

Dynamic Changes in the Association Between Education and Health in the United States.

Policy Points We reviewed some of the recent advances in education and health, arguing that attention to social contextual factors and the dynamics of social and institutional change provide critical insights into the ways in which the association is embedded in institutional contexts. Based on our findings, we believe incorporating this perspective is fundamentally important to ameliorate current negative trends and inequality in Americans' health and longevity.

Improving Older Adults' Health by Reducing Administrative Burden.

Policy Points Administrative burdens, which are the onerous experiences people have when trying to access government benefits and services, reduce older adult's access to health promoting policies. Although considerable attention has been focused on threats to the old-age welfare state, ranging from long-term financing problems to attempts to roll back benefits, administrative barriers to these programs already threaten their effectiveness. Reducing administrative burden is a viable way to improve population health among older adults going forward over the next decade.

Futureproofing Social Support Policies for Population Health.

Policy Points In America, wages appear to be growing relative to purchasing power over time. However, while the ability to purchase consumer goods has indeed improved, the cost of basic survival needs such as health care and education has increased faster than wages have grown. America's weakening social policy landscape has led to a massive socioeconomic rupture in which the middle class is disappearing, such that most Americans now cannot afford basic survival needs, such as education and health insurance. Social policies strive to rebalance societal resources from socioeconomically advantaged groups to those in need. Education and health insurance benefits have been experimentally proven to also improve health and longevity. The biological pathways through which they work are also understood.

Strategic Messaging to Promote Policies that Advance Racial Equity: What Do We Know, and What Do We Need to Learn?

Policy Points Many studies have explored the impact of message strategies to build support for policies that advance racial equity, but few studies examine the effects of richer stories of lived experience and detailed accounts of the ways racism is embedded in policy design and implementation. Longer messages framed to emphasize social and structural causes of racial inequity hold significant potential to enhance support for policies to advance racial equity. There is an urgent need to develop, test, and disseminate communication interventions that center perspectives from historically marginalized people and promote policy advocacy, community mobilization, and collective action to advance racial equity. CONTEXT: Long-standing racial inequities in health and well-being are shaped by racialized public policies that perpetuate disadvantage among Black, Brown, Indigenous, and people of color. Strategic messaging can accelerate public and policymaker support for public policies that advance population health. We lack a comprehensive understanding of lessons learned from work on policy messaging to advance racial equity and the gaps in knowledge it reveals. METHODS: A scoping review of peer-reviewed studies from communication, psychology, political science, sociology, public health, and health policy that have tested how various message strategies influence support and mobilization for racial equity policy domains across a wide variety of social systems. We used keyword database searches, author bibliographic searches, and reviews of reference lists from relevant sources to compile 55 peer-reviewed papers with 80 studies that used experiments to test the effects of one or more message strategies in shaping support for racial equity-related policies, as well as the cognitive/emotional factors that predict their support. FINDINGS: Most studies report on the short-term effects of very short message manipulations. Although many of these studies find evidence that reference to race or use of racial cues tend to undermine support for racial equity-related policies, the accumulated body of evidence has generally not explored the effects of richer, more nuanced stories of lived experience and/or detailed historical and contemporary accounts of the ways racism is embedded in public policy design and implementation. A few well-designed studies offer evidence that longer-form messages framed to emphasize social and structural causes of racial inequity can enhance support for policies to advance racial equity, though many questions require further research. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude by laying out a research agenda to fill numerous wide gaps in the evidentiary base related to building support for racial equity policy across sectors.

Experiences of Poverty Around the Time of a Birth: A Research Note.

While research highlights that, on average, women's income and labor force participation fall around the time of a birth, little is known about how women's experiences of poverty around childbirth vary by birth parity or race and ethnicity. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (a comprehensive measure of poverty), this research note examines the poverty rate of mothers overall and by birth parity and racial and ethnic group in the six months before and after childbirth. We also assess the role of current government support programs in moderating financial losses during the time around a birth. We find that poverty rates among mothers increase after childbirth, with the magnitude varying by birth parity and racial and ethnic group. While current government programs help reduce poverty among mothers around childbirth, these programs do not protect mothers from falling into poverty after childbirth nor do they reduce the inequities in poverty by race or ethnicity. Our results highlight the need for greater public assistance for mothers with recent births to ensure improved child and family well-being and also call attention to the need for policies to address long-standing racial and ethnic inequities in child and family well-being.

Changes in health-related rehabilitation trajectories following a major Norwegian welfare reform.

BACKGROUND: In this study we investigated the health-related rehabilitation trajectories of young Norwegian adults between 2004-2019. The study period is interesting because it overlaps with an extensive welfare system reform that occurred in Norway between 2006-2011. In parallel with the reform there was a substantial increase in health-related welfare dependency among young people due to mental health conditions. To better understand this group, we addressed three questions: 1) what were the most typical health-related rehabilitation trajectories for young Norwegians aged 23-27 between 2004-2019, 2) did the trajectories and composition of health-related benefit recipients change overtime and 3) in parallel with the welfare reform, do we see improved labour market outcomes in our study population? METHODS: Using high-quality Norwegian registry data, we established four cohorts of Norwegian health-related rehabilitation benefit recipients aged 23-27 in either 2004 (cohort 1), 2008 (cohort 2), 2011 (cohort 3) or 2014 (cohort 4). The follow-up period for each cohort was six years. We used sequence and cluster analyses to identify typical health-related rehabilitation trajectories. In addition, descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic regression were used to scrutinise the relationship between trajectory types, sociodemographic characteristics and cohort membership. RESULTS: The majority follow trajectories consisting of welfare dependency, unemployment and unstable, low-income work. Both the trajectories and composition of the study population changed across cohorts. Over the observation period there was a 1) three-fold increase in the proportion following a trajectory ending in permanent disability benefits, 2) nine-fold increase in the proportion following trajectories characterised by long periods of health-related rehabilitation, 3) five-fold decrease in the share following unemployment occupational handicap trajectories 4) 6.9% increase in the proportion of early school leavers and 5) 8.9% decrease in the share with disabled parents. CONCLUSION: Our study population is a vulnerable group with suboptimal mental health, functioning and employment outcomes. In conjunction with the welfare reform, we witnessed a significant drop in use of work-related benefits, accompanied by a substantial increase in uptake of health-related rehabilitation- and disability benefits. Thus, it appears that rather than improving employment outcomes, welfare policy changes have created a new problem by steering a greater proportion into disability benefits.

[Analysis of the real capabilities of the older people through monitoring web resources.]

We analyzed the real capabilities for the older generation by monitoring web resources and identifying real user requests via the Internet. As a result, we formed a database containing dataset of the real capabilities for the older generation. We assumes the directions to implement survey results in developing socio-humanitarian technologies for improving the well-being of the older people based on a comparison of ideas about their real needs in scientific literature, state strategy and user web requests. We propose a systematization of the real capabilities of the older people into the following groups: 1) primary needs for financial assistance and medical care, social protection; 2) capabilities for communication, including the digital environment, and autonomy of residence; 3) capabilities for work and self-development; 4) the capability for self-realization. We proposed recommendations to create a simulation model of needs for monitoring socio-economic changes in the aging economy in real time.