Exploring the Nexus of Energy Burden, Social Capital, and Environmental Quality in Shaping Health in US Counties.

The United States spends more on health care than any other OECD country, yet the nation's health is declining. Recent research has identified multiple sources for this decline, including one's position in social and economic structures, environmental quality, and individual and collective social capital. This paper assesses the primary hypotheses that the health effects of household energy burden, social capital and environmental quality on aggregated community health levels remain while controlling for other determinants.

Theory building on the high seas of population health: Love Boat, Mutiny on the Bounty, or Poseidon Adventure?

The complexity of health is a vast, seductive ocean that beckons us—challenging us to explore, navigate, and often battle against waves of ideas—within ourselves and among others.

A guide and glossary on post-positivist theory building for population health.

This guide and glossary focuses on the role of theory and conceptual models within population health research. Upon discussing the critical need for theory in conducting interdisciplinary research, it provides strategies for crafting theories that can be empirically tested and a glossary of theory building terms that are useful for guiding research. In addition to general concepts, the glossary includes some terminology commonly found in the social sciences, whose well established traditions and practices of formal theory building may be particularly informative for epidemiologists and other population health researchers who have minimal formal social science training, but study social factors in their research.