Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center: Social Environment Domain

With an overarching goal of advancing life-course research on the Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and AD-Related Dementias (ADRD) exposome, our vision for the GECC is to serve as a centralized hub for accessing, harmonizing, linking, and sharing exposome data for AD/ADRD researchers across disciplines, with a focus on the following six key domains: (1) climate, (2) physical environment, (3) social environment, (4) policy environment, (5) community services environment, and (6) life experiences. activities. By bringing together expertise across exposome domains, the GECC will facilitate research that acknowledges and studies the way in which aspects of the exposome, typically studied in silos, interact, and influence each other.

Landscapes Lab leads the GECC work on the social environment domain. For structural and policy-relevant measures of the social environment, we will innovate by building on humanist and social science theory, which are generally not integrated into studies of aging. This will allow us to provide guidance on historical and contemporary measures that reflect social resources as well as social control of residents that are highly novel for health studies. Across both the structural and relational measures of the social environment, we will engage stakeholders including survey methodologists, geographers, sociologists, social psychologists, and experts working directly with communities to understand the ways in which older adults navigate and perceive their neighborhoods.