Entretien avec Pierre Chauvin

This interview was conducted with Pierre Chauvin, MD, PhD, Director of research at the French Institute for Health and Medical Researches (Inserm), and Director of the Social Epidemiology Research Center (ERES) of Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health (UMRS 1136, Inserm & UPMC Sorbonne University) in Paris. Pierre Chauvin conducted research for nearly twenty years on health inequalities and social and territorial determinants of health and access to health care. Since 2005, he is the co-founder and main investigator of the SIRS cohort (which means Health, Inequalities and Social Disruptions) conducted in Paris region among 3,000 inhabitants within 50 neighborhoods. According to Chauvin, health behaviors, in the broad sense, are shaped and influenced by a large number of determinants, among which standards (collective and individual) and social interactions, that are all, or almost all, shaped to varying degrees by gender relations. Nevertheless, the gender issue remains largely understudied in social epidemiology and public health in France, although it is well recognized that it is a social determinant of health and that distinctive features related to gender are documented in France as elsewhere. To better take gender into account in epidemiology, it would require the development of multidisciplinary approaches, and to review findings from social sciences in the field of epidemiology and to try to translate these findings into concepts that could be use in quantitative analyses and in useful results for public health policy. The SIRS cohort was created especially to study the role of the living environment in individuals’ health and behaviors related to health (prevention, health care, etc.). From SIRS data, differences in daily mobility were observed by gender and socioeconomic status, probably emphasizing gendered territorial practices. Differences can be explained by the relationships with the neighborhood, especially with the gendered social roles and behaviors and the division of everyday tasks which remain largely assigned to women, or daily mobility, particularly related to commuting, which is known is unevenly distributed by socio-economic status, level of qualification and sectors and, thus, are largely dependent on gender. Therefore, women may be more sensitive than men to the effects of contextual characteristics of their environment on health, especially for the least mobile of them, which has been shown with SIRS data that it was usually the poorest ones.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-SA

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