The workshop identified solutions for how socioeconomic data can be used in population health research in Europe, as prototyped by the BY-COVID Baseline Use Case. A workshop report, and associated, full-length project report on the integration of socioeconomic data for health research were recently published.
Background
Socioeconomic factors such as income, education, and political beliefs can have important impacts on health outcomes. The use of socioeconomic data into health research is therefore a promising yet relatively underdeveloped approach which has gained significant attention in recent years.
BY-COVID aims to make data on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases from the social sciences and other scientific disciplines available to the public, in order to improve European readiness for future pandemics. DANS and other members of CESSDA (the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) provide socioeconomic expertise and data within BY-COVID.
This workshop follows a previous workshop that was held in April 2023 on the “Integration of socioeconomic data in observational studies on vaccine effectiveness” to promote community discussion on these topics in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Workshop aims
This current workshop builds upon the prior workshop, and aimed to:
- identify solutions for integrating socioeconomic data in population health research;
- generalise such solutions in various disciplinary and geographical contexts (EU-level focus); and
- translate the workshop findings into an innovative workflow standard to federated population health research.
As the workshop title suggests, the focus was mainly on practical solutions to integrating individual-level socioeconomic data. Such data is highly important for estimating health outcomes, particularly when linked with health data. However, this data is associated with particular data security and privacy challenges. Much of the workshop discussions therefore centred around solutions for how to safely and ethically acquire and manage such data, particularly using the federated analysis workflow developed in BY-COVID.
Workshop report and following report
The workshop report contains slides and recordings of presentations provided by the BY-COVID team. The presentations provide an overview of the BY-COVID project and the Baseline Use Case, as well as a closer look at how its partners and data providers have approached data availability, processing, and associated challenges. The report also includes notes from the following breakout sessions, which focused on how participants’ experiences with the mobilizing and linking of sensitive social science data for health research.
The results from this and the prior workshop will contribute to a full-length report on how socioeconomic data was integrated into the Baseline Use Case, including the associated federated analysis workflow and methodology developed for this.
