Social determinants and health behaviors: conceptual frames and empirical advances

• Health behaviors reflect interplay between people and contextual factors.
• ‘Social determinants’ include societal institutions, ideologies, and inequalities.
• Health behaviors contribute to and reflect embodiment and other biosocial processes.
• Recent work engages health lifestyles, agency, and multilevel life course dynamics.
• Empirical advances model feedback among social, psychological and biological factors.

Health behaviors shape health and well-being in individuals and populations. Drawing on recent research, we review applications of the widely applied ‘social determinants’ approach to health behaviors. This approach shifts the lens from individual attribution and responsibility to societal organization and the myriad institutions, structures, inequalities, and ideologies undergirding health behaviors. Recent scholarship integrates a social determinants perspective with biosocial approaches to health behavior dynamics. Empirical advances model feedback among social, psychological and biological factors. Health behaviors are increasingly recognized as multi-dimensional and embedded in health lifestyles, varying over the life course and across place and reflecting dialectic between structure and agency that necessitates situating individuals in context. Advances in measuring and modeling health behaviors promise to enhance representations of this complexity.