What will your ERC project focus on?
“How have inequalities in health and survival developed over time? A child is born into a family – what is their chance of a long of healthy life, given how well their relatives are doing in terms of health and survival? The project will focus on health and survival, or mortality, depending on how you choose to view it. How old do people become? What are the mechanisms behind it? We have very few tools to study such questions over time. In my project, I propose to study these developments using similarities between relatives.
In the same generation, are people quite similar to each other or not? How does that change over time? Do you have more or less the same lifestyle as your siblings and your cousins? How similar are you to your parents, over time, in terms of health and mortality? These may be abstract questions, but many people have studied these for poverty, for example: Having poor parents, and growing up in poverty, will you be poor yourself? Basically, I want to apply those questions to health and for how long people live.
I’m going to look at different countries and, over the long term, at changes in how distinct families are from each other in their health and survival. I will use data from Sweden, the Netherlands and one U.S. State (Utah). We start in the 1800s and end around today for Sweden and Utah, and in the 1960s for the Netherlands. We’ll also use survey data for another 60 countries around the world.”
What do you hope to achieve?
“One purpose of this project is to apply a broad perspective on inequality, health and survival. Previous studies have put this in relation to income, education or social class. For all these things, there is a health gradient, the best educated and most affluent live longer. But maybe these indicators are not the best instruments to measure changes in inequality. Maybe in some contexts, education is more important, and in others income. What I’m trying to do in this project is to look at how similar people are, to look at social inequality a bit broader, not just in relation to those specific social characteristics but to any of them. We are often quick to think about genetics in these cases, but there is also a social side to similarities between relatives."
What does this grant mean to you?
“I appreciate that ERC gives the researchers a lot of flexibility and the academic freedom to really think about the idea. I look forward to pursuing these super interesting and important questions for the next couple of years. And to recruit a team to do it together with.”
What is the practical application of the results of the project?
“The results are not required to be able to be used in a practical sense. That is one of the good things about the ERC grants. They are supposed to be projects that change our minds a bit, in my case; how people view health and inequality. It can be of use in further research though and I do see that the results might become politically relevant: we often talk about changes in health in the last decades, but studying health over the long term might be very useful. If people are now the healthiest, were their ancestors that as well and what does that tell us about inequality?”
Can you tell us a bit about your previous projects?
“In my most recent project, I studied families in the Netherlands and Sweden that did particularly well in terms of survival. Why are they as healthy as they are, and are their children also healthy? The focus then was on the families that did really well, but I started thinking, what about the ones not doing so well? It is all about understanding inequality and that is why I started writing on this big project application.”
