Editors’ ASM Picks
Some of the Newsletter Editors have assembled a few of their top picks from the SSM Annual Scientific Meeting conference programme.
Will Ball is looking forward to ‘Understanding the Mental Health of Children Known to Social Services in Northern Ireland: An Administrative Data Linkage Study’ from McKenna et al (O09) on Wednesday, which promises an innovative use of administrative data sources and data linkage methods which have seen increased interest since the start of this year.
He’s also keen to hear about ‘Social prescribing and classed inequalities in health: exploring a complex relationship using ethnographic methods’ from Gibson et al (O83) on Friday. Sociological methodologies employed here to explore health inequalities and potentially controversial application of Social Prescribing should provide an excellent complement to other quantitative work at the ASM.
Max Barnish is interested to hear from Pell et al and their talk ‘Changes in household purchases of soft drinks up to one year after implementation of the UK Soft Drinks Industry Levy: a controlled interrupted time series analysis’ (O31) on Thursday, particularly as it promises to evaluate a real-life policy intervention and follows on from topics discussed at previous ASMs.
He is looking forward to ‘We Can Quit2 – Preliminary results of a pilot cluster randomised controlled trial of a community-based intervention on smoking cessation for women living in disadvantaged areas of Ireland’ by Hayes et al (O13) on Wednesday, which he thinks has an interesting focus and picks up on the gendered needs of smoking cessation in a context of social deprivation.
Kate Mason has picked the Health Inequalities stream on Wednesday and is particularly looking forward to ‘Using cross-sectoral administrative data linkage to understand the health of people experiencing multiple exclusion’ by Tweed et al (O20). Given the tendency to focus on single dimensions of exclusion, marginalisation or disadvantage, Kate is keen to hear how Tweed and colleagues might have made use of administrative data linked across multiple sources to move towards a broader and more intersectional understanding of the health impacts of exclusion.
She is also interested in Baxter et al’s ‘Did England’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy reduce pregnancy rates in England? Evaluating a policy using two natural experimental methods’ (O91) on Friday. Not only does the title leave Kate wanting to know the answer to the question, she is also looking forward to finding out which natural policy experiment approaches they’ve taken, and how the results compare.
The ASM Oral and Poster Programmes are available on the conference website.