About the project
The ELiSE project provides an innovative framework that combines temporal, geographical, social, genetic, and individual level of understanding of the link between social inequality and mental health. By studying people with a similar genetic makeup, we can uncover how time periods, places of residence, schools, and families affect connections. This will give us the opportunity to simultaneously investigate hypotheses about direct and indirect pathways into poor mental health and school difficulties. ELiSE will provide completely new ways of studying how the risk of mental health problems and school difficulties is transferred from parents to children, why early mental health problems increase the risk of later school difficulties, how genes and environment interact to provide protective contexts and what characterizes places where children have the best psychological development.
Objectives
The ELiSE project will address the impact of early life socioeconomic factors for mental health and educational success, while evaluating children’s individual sensitivity to contextual school and community environments, by studying:
- Transmission between generations: How the parents’ socioeconomic status and non-cognitive skills directly and indirectly affect child mental health and educational performance.
- Mental health as a process: Reveal whether children do well at school despite their low socioeconomic background if they are mentally healthy.
- Sensitivity to the environment: Evaluate models for how individual risk and resources for illbeing, wellbeing, and educational performance are differentially expressed across total school and community environments.
- Specific developmental contexts: Identify school and community characteristics that reduces individual risk and promotes individual resources.
Research methods
With a nested population-based cohort study comprising information from 100 000 genotyped families, combined with a with a wide array of survey data and data from national registries with information on kinship, place of residence, socio-economic status, mental health and educational background, we will investigate the interplay between neighborhood and family factors. This innovational investigation of the interaction between neighborhood and risk in families will help us understand inequality in mental health and school difficulties, and able us to study genes and the environment for social inequality and mental health.
