This paper examines neighbourhood effects on health within a large Canadian city--Montréal. Our approach is to consider that individual health outcomes are determined both by individual and neighbourhood characteristics and we consciously take on the problem of neighbourhood definition by developing 'natural' neighbourhoods. Our data come from the Montréal health region sample of the 2000/1 Can...

BACKGROUND Neighbourhood socioeconomic disadvantage and social capital have been associated with adolescent well-being, but the majority of studies were cross-sectional, and the time window over which the neighbourhood may impact on development is unknown. Therefore, the contribution of the neighbourhood environment to adolescents' quality of life and the course of these effects during the peri...

The neighbourhood may provide resources for health. It is to date unknown whether people who live in neighbourhoods with more social capital have more access to practical and emotional support by neighbours, or whether this is a resource only available to those who are personally connected to people in their neighbourhood. We investigated whether support by neighbours of people with chronic ill...

BACKGROUND Several studies have shown the positive effect of neighbourhood social capital on health. Existing research, however, has hitherto not studied whether the duration and intensity of exposure to neighbourhood social capital conditions and its effect on health. The aim of this study was to examine whether neighbourhood social capital affects individual's health immediately and equally. ...

BACKGROUND Neighbourhood socioeconomic status (SES) may affect rich and poor residents differentially. Two models are proposed. Model 1: living in a non-deprived neighbourhood is better for health because better collective material and social resources are available. Model 2: being poor (rich) relative to the neighbourhood average is associated with worse (better) health because of the discrepa...

In this paper, we start the study of polymodal neighbourhood languages. We provide a completeness result for the basic polymodal neighbourhood system and show how some important systems based on neighbourhood like semantics can be simulated as subsystems of ours.

BACKGROUND In recent years, research on the association between physical environments and cardiovascular disease outcomes has gained momentum with growing attention being paid to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This nationwide study is the first to examine the effect of neighbourhood physical environments on individual-level stroke, using GIS-based measures of neighbourhood availability o...

BACKGROUND It is hypothesized that neighbourhood satisfaction and subjective happiness are associated with self-rated health or mediate the effect from urbanization levels among youth. METHODS Taiwan Youth Project was a cross-sectional study in two cities, Taipei and Yilan, Taiwan including 5,586 students. Information on neighbourhood satisfaction, happiness, urbanization levels, and self-rat...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this research was to determine the relationship between modeled particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure and birth weight, including the potential modification by maternal risk factors and indicators of socioeconomic status (SES). METHODS Birth records from 2001 to 2006 (N = 231,929) were linked to modeled PM2.5 data from a national land-use regression model along with ne...