The Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR) archives materials older than three years that are no longer updated. This content is available for historical purposes, and the information and links may have changed over time.
Prevention of child abuse and neglect is an ongoing public health need that disproportionately affects children born to very young parents. Children of teen mothers are twice as likely to enter foster care compared to mothers aged just 20–21 years. C…
The National Institutes of Health today announced $157 million in awards in fiscal year 2016 to launch a seven-year initiative called Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO). The ECHO program will investigate how exposure to a r…
Only 2 out of 10 older adults meet the national guidelines for physical activity in the United States. Little is known about interrelationships of many socio-ecological factors to improve physical activity behavior among Hispanic older adults. As we…
It now is well known that stress negatively impacts both physical and mental health. Across species, higher levels of stress are associated with mortality rates; systemic inflammation; development of various physical health conditions, like asthma, d…
Why do people report better mental health in some countries than in others? In the early 2000s, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted the World Mental Health Survey in 14 countries and found that the prevalence of mental disorders varies sign…
Self-report is the most commonly used method to collect data in behavioral research, but its reliability and validity have always been hotly debated. Obtaining reliable and valid data on behavioral questions especially sensitive ones (e.g., risky sex…
The World Health Organization now recognizes social relationships as an important social determinant of health throughout our lives. Yet, the acknowledgement that social ties can shape our morbidity and mortality has been at times an uphill struggle.…
Culture informs all human behavior: in it we exist as social animals. Perhaps because culture is inescapable it seems also elusive as a definable construct, and the culture of scientists recoils from a variable it believes it cannot grasp … almost li…
My undergraduate class happened upon an interesting puzzle while reading Leisureville by Andrew Blechman: Social gerontologists love intergenerational communities, but older people love age-segregated communities.
“Pull” mHealth portable and wearable devices let us choose the health interventions we want and deploy them from wherever we happen to be. Now, with the advent of increasingly powerful sensors, “push” interventions can adaptively respond to our actio…
