Social and occupational influences, migration

The health of the population in Germany is influenced not least by socio-economic factors. These include, for example, education, marital status, occupational status and specific working conditions, unemployment, income, and migration background. An analysis of health by gender also reveals clear differences. The disparities between social groups are, in some cases, pronounced and affect almost all major diseases and health-related factors. The German National Cohort (NAKO) is an important resource for the scientific investigation of these relationships. The members of the expert group on ‘Social and Occupational Influences, Migration’ are researchers active in the fields of social, occupational and migration epidemiology; they both initiate their own analysis projects based on NAKO data and provide advisory support for analysis projects carried out by other data users.

Tasks:

• Supervision of the content of the questionnaire sections designed to collect data on socio-demographic and socio-economic characteristics, as well as certain work-related factors.
• Quality assurance and processing of raw data from the measurement of socio-demographic and socio-economic variables; creation of relevant derived variables to determine key characteristics (such as years of education, occupational coding and migration status); alignment with key reference studies.
• Support in the further development of methods and survey instruments for the follow-up studies of NAKO participants.
• Support through expert knowledge in response to topic-specific enquiries from external partners and data users: The members of the expert group contribute their expertise to the analysis projects of external partners who address social and occupational epidemiological issues in their analyses, and participate in relevant use and access applications.
• Initiating our own research projects on socio-epidemiological, migration-specific and occupational epidemiological issues.
• Comparative studies on healthcare research.
• Analyses to estimate the effect of migration status or social class on the incidence, survival time and mortality of various chronic and communicable diseases.
• Support the Executive Board and central office with public relations work (e.g. press enquiries) on specific issues.