The Quebec Interuniversity Centre for Social Statistics (QICSS) is inviting submissions to its international conference on Social policy and health inequalities: An international perspective which will take place in Montreal in May 2014. The deadline to submit an abstract is September 1.

Organized in partnership with the CRDCN and the Centre Léa-Roback, the conference first objective is to showcase leading edge international research on the impact of social policies and programs on health inequalities. The conference aims to encourage international exchanges in order to demonstrate the range of research practices and outputs, as well as to stimulate debate between the key stakeholders, including data producers, researchers and research users from governments and civil society.

Questions that could be the topic of a submission include, but are not limited to:

• What are the promises and limits of social statistics for the study of the determinants and the consequences of health inequalities?
• How do we assess and navigate the existing frameworks of indicators of health inequalities, and from there, apply them to the appropriate questions? In particular, how can we bridge the research-policy divide and promote integrated knowledge translation?
• What methodological or data developments could improve our estimation of causal relationships between social determinants and health inequalities?
• What are the conditions and the characteristics of data infrastructure that optimize access to and use of data?
• What can we learn from different forms of data (administrative, population surveys, etc)?
• How can health inequalities and policy data be used to compare the situation within and between high-income economies?  What are the scope and limitations of such comparisons?
• What are the best practices in measuring policy impacts on health inequalities, including through program evaluation? What’s missing?

All details are available on the conference website.