Brooklyn Richins, a current Health Promotion student, has expanded the research on the impact of socioeconomic advantages on family health.
Presented at the Life Sciences Research Conference on October 25th, Richins showcased her research and was awarded second place in the Public Health Department.
“I'm really fascinated by disparities that come from the social determinants of health. I felt like socioeconomic factors were not being explored by anyone else in the lab,” she said. After connecting with Dr. Ali Crandall, Richins delved into researching socioeconomic advantages.
Surveying 135 triads of young adults, parents, and grandparents from the same family line, Richins and her team examined how generational socioeconomic status (SES) impacts family health outcomes. “We specifically looked at the family health outcomes for the young adult to see how SES over three generations would affect them,” Richins stated.
The research explored factors such as education levels, household income, perceived SES, childhood poverty, neighborhood safety, and home type. Based on these factors, the parents and grandparents were given a socioeconomic score between 0-6. Then the team was able to look at the relationship between these determinants and family health.
“We found that grandparents’ SES did not affect the young adults’ family health outcomes,” Richins said. They hypothesized that this was because most participants were not living in multi-generational houses, reducing the direct influence on young adults’ lives.
“The parent’s SES affected most of the family health outcomes,” she continued. The parents had associations with overall family health, family health resources, and family health lifestyles. Therefore, parents with more socioeconomic advantages were more able to provide health to their families. This is because a higher SES can connect people with resources, knowledge, and finances to support their families and young adult children more advantageously.
However, while there were associations in these domains, all these associations were marginal. “This shows us that families can be well and healthy regardless of SES,” Richins said. With this knowledge, public health professionals can minimize the disparities by making access to resources more feasible for families.
“The biggest takeaway is that we can increase access to resources for these families to continue having more positive family health outcomes across all generations,” she said. This research has shown us that it is possible to create healthy environments in families regardless of socioeconomic factors.
Richins and her team are recollecting longitudinal data to see how the family health outcomes are changing over time. They are also increasing the sample size to see the effects of the sample size on the results.
Unfortunately, Richins is graduating after this year and will not be continuing on this research project. “There are other people in the lab that will be working on it, and I’m hoping that they continue forward to see if the results are consistent and what kind of factors play a role in discrepancies,” she said.
The impact that this research has made will help public health officials understand how to promote resources to multi-generational families. Richins also urges other people to get involved in research. “Just go and talk to professors because they are so willing to make room for research assistants,” she said.
With contributions from students like Richins, public health research is poised to create lasting, positive impacts on the community’s well-being.
