SHISA: social health in social work

Our Research

The research group SHISA brings together researchers with interdisciplinary backgrounds who are interested in how relationships, social networks, and societal conditions influence people’s opportunities for health and participation. Based on the WHO’s view of social health as a dimension of health alongside physical and mental health, the group focuses on both individuals’ life situations and structural factors such as inequality, segregation, and discrimination.

Our research forms a natural part of social work, as it spans areas such as:

• social vulnerability
• violence
• sexuality
• migration and integration
• addiction and substance abuse
• ill health
• loneliness.

Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, and drawing on various theoretical and conceptual approaches, we study how inadequate social relationships, marginalization, and exclusion manifest in people’s everyday lives and can lead to social ill health and, ultimately, mental and physical ill health. The three dimensions of health—physical, mental, and social—overlap and interact over time.

Our research also includes examining how social connectedness and social networks strengthen social health, both from an individual perspective and at a societal level. It is also important to study the strategies individuals develop to maintain or achieve social health, as well as which structural interventions may be effective. The different research foci are also relevant to several other disciplines within the faculty, such as nursing science and criminology. The focus of the research group is closely linked to the academic field of Health and Society Studies.