Session: Invited Symposia: Incorporating Biomarkers Into Social Work Research: A Practical Overview (Society for Social Work and Research 15th Annual Conference: Emerging Horizons for Social Work Research)

The session provides an orientation to biomarker research--what this means, how it is undertaken, what questions biomarkers help address, and ways biomarkers are relevant to social work research. The intent is to provide a practical overview for non-specialists in the field who have limited experience collecting and analyzing biological specimens. One session focus will be on biomarker data’s utility relative to issues such as racial/ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities. Specifically, we will discuss and the extent to which regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (one of the body’s stress systems) may mediate associations between social environmental factors and increased psychosocial stress among minorities and low-income individuals and observed health disparities. This involves illustration of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in basal patterns of salivary cortisol, a stress-related hormone, produced by the HPA axis, and the implications of basal cortisol activity for various physical and mental health outcomes. By the end of the workshop, participants should be able to make informed decisions about the appropriateness of specific biomarkers for their research and have a good sense of how to begin to go about collecting the data, with an emphasis on understanding the difficulties and potential pitfalls of collecting cortisol (and other biomarker) data in naturalistic settings and best methods to avoid them.