About the project
Increasing inequality is a defining feature of the world children grow up in today. Children’s demographic and socio-economic status (SES) is given by the status of their parents, and the neighborhood they live in stages a primary developmental context where inequality plays out.The GeoGen research project aims to understand how and why early life socioeconomic position is linked to mental health and educational performance. We want to investigate how and why children from so-called low socioeconomic status have poorer mental health and school performance, as well as how neighborhoods and schools contribute to environmental impacts on mental health and educational attainment.
Objectives
Our goal is to study:
- How risk is transmitted across generations,
- How mental health in early life is an antecedent of academic failure,
- The interactions between genetic risk and protective contextual factors, and
- The characteristics of schools and neighborhoods that are optimal for children’s psychological development.
Methods
In this nested population-based cohort study, we will use data from several Norwegian population-based registries on place of residence, indicators of SES, mental health, and educational performance, combined with genotyping of families (n=240 000 in 110 000 families) and a wide array of survey data. The unique combination of data on all people in all schools and neighborhoods over time allows for an unprecedented study on the gene-environment interplay between risk and protective factors for mental health and academic outcomes.
Financing
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101045526).
