Professor Chris Bonell
Senior Investigator
Professor of Public Health Sociology
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Email: chris.bonell@lshtm.ac.uk
Telephone: 020 7612 7918
Prior to working at LSHTM Chris was Professor of Sociology & Social Policy at University College London and Professor of Sociology & Social Intervention at the University of Oxford. He was also previously Research Team Leader in the UK government’s Social Exclusion Unit.
His main areas of research are on adolescent health, sexual health, substance use and social exclusion and health, as well as in research methodology.
His research on adolescent health focuses on how schools and school-based interventions as well as youth services can benefit or harm young people’s health. His research on sexual health examines the broader social determinants of adolescent sexual health behaviours and outcomes, and interventions to address these. He is also interested in the normal distribution of sexual risks and consequent need for universal interventions. He has also developed a programme of research in collaboration with Sigma Research on the sexual health of gay and other men who have sex with men. This has in particular focused on the interactions between substance use and sexual behaviour. In terms of substance use, his main interest is in the initiation of this in adolescence and interventions to minimise risks.
Almost all of his research is concerned with how social exclusion in the form of poverty or other forms of disadvantage is associated with health risks. As well as the above, his research has examined for example how HIV risk in low income settings is associated with poverty and educational disadvantage, as well as how educational disengagement and subsequent adolescent health risks are inadvertent consequences of current UK educational policies. His research has also critiqued some formulations of social exclusion, for example demonstrating that risk of teenage pregnancy far from being a problem of a discrete group of social excluded adolescents is actually normally distributed and so requires universal not merely targeted interventions.
In terms of methodology, he has written a number of methodological papers on: theorising and evaluating intervention harms; realist trials which combined rigorous evaluations of intervention effects with quantitative and qualitative analyses of what works for whom under what conditions; systematic reviews not only of effectiveness evidence but also process evaluation, qualitative evidence and theories of change; situations in which randomised trials are not appropriate and what alternatives exist; process evaluation; and empirical assessment of intervention transferability. Recent work on ‘dark logic models’ to hypothesise and measure intervention harms was awarded the President’s Prize by the European Society for Prevention Research.