Social Inclusion and Social Determinants of Health

Abstract

There has been renewed enthusiasm over the role of social determinants in impacting health and illness outcomes in the past few decades. While there is unequivocal evidence illustrating how measures of social inclusion interact with health and illness outcomes, the ways in which social inclusion is conceptualized, operationalized, and thus measured are increasingly varied. How then can such emerging work be situated in social determinants of health framework? This chapter begins by charting a brief history of epidemiology and its evolution toward its focus on social determinants of health at the turn of the century; it proposes competing lenses and frameworks to better situate social determinants of health framework that will be utilized in the discussion of social inclusion; it proceeds to review how social inclusion has and can been measured, and its implications for health at varying levels; and it concludes with a commentary on the path forward for research on social inclusion within social determinants of health framework, and the implications that this may have on the communities most affected by issues of social inclusion.