Institute of Sociology NASU

Social determinants of health in biocultural research: a review of evidence

stmm. 2025 (2): 168–182

DOI https://doi.org/10.15407/sociology2025.02.168

Full text: https://stmm.in.ua/archive/ukr/2025-2/11.pdf

KATERYNA MALTSEVA, Dr. habilis in Sociology, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Sociology, NaUKMA (8/5, Volos`ka St., Build. 4, Kyiv, 04655)

maltsevaKS@ukma.edu.ua

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6540-8734

SCOPUS ID 12139513400

Health is biocultural. Some of the challenges the social scientists are traditionally facing include understanding, measuring, and explaining the effects of culture on human condition. While the effects of culture in cognition, emotion, behavior, and health are not disputed, the casual relationships between them and their specific mechanisms are still not clearly understood. Current biocultural research explores multiple themes and subsumes several diverse intellectual positions. Although this set of approaches is highly suitable to explore the critical junctures within health research, it is a relatively new research trajectory. In terms of data, biocultural research builds on interdisciplinary evidence. As the interdisciplinary communication between the social and life sciences has expanded and intensified, during the last few decades we have witnessed an incremental interest in the ways various forms of social organization affect health. It is understood that health is shaped by many factors. Social determinants of health theory is a framework offering important insights into how exactly human society can affect and mold human health and disease. Socio-epidemiological research offers ample insights into the risk factors associated with these determinants, as well as the pathways linking social conditions to the important health outcomes. One of the major ways social factors of such nature can affect human physiology and shape the patterns of health and illness is by generating stress. Being present in one’s life from birth through maturation to senescence, social determinants of health are conceptualized as exercising systematic pressure in daily lives of individuals. SES is considered the most potent among social determinants of stress. While social determinants of health are conceptualized as the most modifiable among the health-determining conditions and therefore highly actionable to improve health and the quality of life, many questions still require solutions. One of the possible avenues for both improving our understanding of how social determinants of health work and painting a complete picture of what the social gradient in health is, is by way of inclusion of the ethnographically diverse settings, to glean more data from non-Western societies in order to explore how the social gradient in health emerges.

Keywords: biocultural research; social determinants of health; social stressors; culture

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Received 24.02.2025

Accepted for publication after review 30.03.2025

Published 2025