Project Proposal

Project rationale, objectives, expected outputs, and co-creation design for the CO-LUMINATE study.

Project At A Glance

CO-LUMINATE investigates how social stress exposures shape depressive symptoms among young people in rural South Africa over time. The work links cohort mental health outcomes with AHRI HDSS household trajectories to support longitudinal and mediation-focused analysis.

Scope

  • Population focus: adolescents and young adults aged 13-24 years.
  • Data structure: linked longitudinal cohort and HDSS records.
  • Core domains: socioeconomic status, food insecurity, caregiver co-residency, and related social stress exposures.
  • Outcome focus: symptoms of depression measured repeatedly over time.
  • Co-creation: youth partners contribute to interpretation and relevance framing.

Study Objectives (Full Statement)

  1. Objective 1: Youth Co-Creation. Co-create a shared understanding of how social determinants shape young people’s mental health through a Youth Advisory Group, and integrate youth-led input into hypothesis generation, lay DAG development, interpretation, and dissemination framing.
  2. Objective 2: Depression Harmonization. Describe prevalence of depression in the CO-LUMINATE dataset by harmonizing depression measures across cohorts (including SSQ and PHQ-9 sources) and deriving transportable depression outcomes for longitudinal analysis.
  3. Objective 3: Social Determinant Trajectories. Characterize social determinant trajectories across childhood windows, including early childhood (0-5 years) and later childhood (6-12 years), and identify exposure-pattern pathways linked to adolescent depression outcomes.
  4. Objective 4: Behavioral Mediators. Examine behavioral mediators, including migration, substance use, and sexual behaviour, as pathway mechanisms linking social determinants to depressive symptoms, and prioritize mediator structures for downstream causal modeling.
  5. Objective 5: Causal Mediation. Estimate direct and mediated effects of key social determinants on depression among young people using longitudinal causal mediation methods and context-sensitive interpretation informed by the youth co-creation workstream.

Planned Deliverables

  • Curated linked analysis datasets with supporting metadata and documentation.
  • Reproducible statistical workflows, technical reports, and presentation outputs.
  • Evidence summaries for research, policy, and stakeholder engagement.
  • Co-created interpretation products to strengthen contextual validity and uptake.

Access To Full Proposal

This page presents a high-level summary for website readers.
The full proposal is an internal document and is not published on the website.

Requests for the full proposal can be directed to the study team and will be considered at the Principal Investigator’s discretion.