The objectives of our research programme are to develop public health research in the field of social epidemiology, which studies the relations between individuals’ social situations, their residential context, and their health and recourse to care, by combining epidemiological and sociological approaches and qualitative and quantitative methods.

Among all the above social determinants, the research programme focuses on assessing the impacts of social integration or breaks and of family and residential context, without, however, ignoring living conditions. On the contrary, the research combines psychosocial and materialist approaches to social epidemiology as it looks for the underlying mechanisms generating reported social inequalities in health. The team project is broken down into three research tracks so that these aspects can be addressed from complementary outlooks:

· social and contextual determinants of the recourse to care,

· psychosocial and geographic determinants of health,

· health, precariousness and migration.

This project is based on developing and monitoring 2 cohorts - Sirs and Record -in the Ile-de-France region.

The DS3 team headed by P. Chauvin was established in 2002 thanks to support from the INSERM Avenir programme. Since 2005, the team has been receiving multiyear support from the medical research programme of the City of Paris and project-based support from several institutions, namely the Ile-de-France region, the French National Research Agency, the French General Directorate for Health and the City Interministerial Delegation.

DS3 is one of the four teams at the joint INSERM – Pierre & Marie Curie University Research Unit “Epidemiology, information system and modelling” (UMRS 707) headed by G. Thomas.