COMMENTARY

Psychosocial epidemiology

Psychosocial factors and public health

A Singh-Manoux¹

¹ International Centre for Health and Society, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, 1–19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 6BT, UK

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr A Singh-Manoux;
A.Singh-Manoux@public-health.ucl.ac.uk

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Another point of view (see page 565)

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Keywords: psychosocial factors

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Macleod and Davey Smith state that the aim of their paper is to critically examine the role of psychosocial factors in health.¹ Unfortunately, what could have been an interesting discussion is compromised by the authors implicit assumption that there is a single pathway linking social position to health. The authors seem to equate parsimonious causal analysis with a narrow, reductionistic perspective, subsequently devoting most of their paper to a discussion of "psychosocial versus material explanation", while ignoring evidence showing multiple pathways linking social position to health.^2,3

This commentary widens the debate by considering three issues:

Psychosocial variables encompass two categories of variables. The first consists of psychological attributes like hostility, depression, hopelessness, etc, which exist at the individual level, and are likely to be a result of the process of socialisation. The second category is more structural in nature, work conditions for example. These two categories work synergistically . . . [Full text of this article]

J Macleod², G Davey Smith³

² Department of Primary Care and General Practice, University of Birmingham, UK
³ Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, UK

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