Research infrastructure A research infrastructure giving access to health and socio-economic individual data on the whole Swedish population. Main research themes include “Childhood living conditions in connection with lifelong health and welfare”, as well as “Health and socio-economic inequalities in a lifecourse perspective.”
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Umeå SIMSAM Lab was founded in 2014 to enable high-quality interdisciplinary research on childhood and life-long health and welfare, with a focus on areas of great societal relevance. The Lab offers a unique infrastructure with prospectively collected individual-level data on the total population of Swedish 1960-2017, comprising about 14.9 million individuals. Each person is assigned a unique serial number allowing for individual-level linkage across multiple data sources, with intergenerational links and geographical coordinates that captures social relations of the family, neighbourhood and place of work. The core of the database is based on the national population registers of Statistics Sweden (e.g. demographic, socioeconomic and school information) and National Board of Health and Welfare (e.g. hospitalization, prescribed drugs, pregnancy and neonatal health). This data has been further enriched by regional population data from the County Council of Västerbotten (e.g. self-reported health, weight & height, health behaviors, accidents). Together, the Umeå SIMSAM Lab offers unprecedented possibilities for example life cycle, intergenerational and multilevel analysis.
Members of the Umeå SIMSAM Lab are affiliated at many departments throughout the Umeå campus, and the steering group consists of researchers from Epidemiology and Global Health, Geography and Economic History, Sociology and Statistics. We actively collaborate with other national and international scientists.
