(How) are we affected by the hardships of our near and dear ones? Studies of the relationship between adverse events among our family or relatives and our own health and welfare.

Research problem: The aim of this project is to investigate whether adult individuals’ health and welfare are affected by adverse life events among their sibling(s) and grandparents. A second aim is to investigate whether accumulated adverse life events within the extended family affect health.

Although emotional attachments to the members of one’s family of origin generally lasts a lifetime, studies on adult family relationships have mainly focused on the individual’s own family formation (i.e. the nuclear family).

Furthermore, alongside all the positive things that family relationships bring, they also tend to affect us when things go wrong.

Previous research show that coping with adversity in the family can involve e.g. emotional distress, feelings of obligation as well as fear of possible heredity.

Studies on the consequences for the by-standing family member are rare, and have largely focused on childhood illness or on the nuclear family.Data and method: We will use the RELINK53-data, containing administrative records from health care, social welfare and crime registers for a 1953 cohort and their family across four generations.

We will model the risk of adverse outcomes as a function of a family member’s adverse life event, using Cox regression. Our research design is to apply the method of emulated clinical trials (ECT) to a social scientific setting.

This is a method of using observational data to emulate the circumstances of a randomized control trial (RCT) in order to answer causal questions.

This method has been successfully tested and used in medical and epidemiological research but has not, to our knowledge, been used to test social scientific questions.Plan for project realization: The results from using ECT-analyses will be written into articles and published in open access journals.

We further plan to involve stakeholders such as government authorities and non-government organizations by inviting them to discuss our ongoing work.

The budget includes salary costs for the main applicant (80%) and project members (10%, respectively), costs for ethical approval and dissemination related expenses.Relevance: There is a lack of research on the role of family members outside the nuclear family for the health of adults.

Increased knowledge on how adverse events among family members affect health could be used to inform care and health care workers who meet the family members of patients or who have patients’ that express anxiety for a loved one.