Study objectives: Social epidemiologists have hypothesised that neighbourhood quality may exert an important contextual influence on mental and physical health. However, validated instruments do not exist for measuring neighbourhood quality in Taiwan. A self reported instrument to measure perceived neighbourhood quality in Taiwan was developed and tested. Design: Community survey. Setting: Sout...

Neighbourhood Effects, Housing Tenure, and Individual Employment Outcomes This paper investigates whether individuals living in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of unemployment are less likely to enter work if they are unemployed and more likely to lose their job if they are employed. The main challenge in the neighbourhood effects literature is the identification of causal neighbourhood...

BACKGROUND Supportive neighbourhood walking conditions are particularly important for older people as they age and who, as a group, prefer walking as a form of physical activity. Urban form and socio-economic status (SES) can influence neighbourhood walking behaviour. The objectives of this study were: a) to examine how urban form and neighbourhood SES inter-relate to affect the experiences of ...

Neighbourhood Effects on Migrant Youth’s Educational Commitments: An Enquiry into Personality Differences In the neighbourhood effects literature, the socialisation mechanism is usually investigated by looking at the association between neighbourhood characteristics and educational attainment. The step in between, that adolescents actually internalise educational norms held by residents, is oft...

BACKGROUND The purposes of this study are to determine (i) if neighbourhood socioeconomic status (SES) is systematically related to the prevalence of overweight children and youth in Canada, (ii) if the factors accounting for the apparent relationship have face validity, and (iii) if neighbourhood SES has an independent influence on this distribution. METHODS Cross-sectional data from Cycle 4...

STUDY OBJECTIVE s: Social epidemiologists have hypothesised that neighbourhood quality may exert an important contextual influence on mental and physical health. However, validated instruments do not exist for measuring neighbourhood quality in Taiwan. A self reported instrument to measure perceived neighbourhood quality in Taiwan was developed and tested. DESIGN Community survey. SETTING S...

In recent years, analyses of neighbourhood externalities have grown with the perceived importance of their influence upon outcomes. Despite this growth, a clear understanding of the role of neighbourhoods in determining outcomes remains elusive. Various attempts have been made to quantify the role of neighbourhoods and limit problems of misspecification that have plagued this literature. Recent...

We test empirically whether people’s life satisfaction depends on their relative income position in the neighbourhood, drawing on a unique dataset, the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics. Relative deprivation theory suggests that individuals are happier the better their relative income position in the neighbourhood is. ...

BACKGROUND Although most countries in the European Union are richer and healthier than ever, health inequalities remain an important public health challenge. Health-related problems and premature death have disproportionately been reported in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Neighbourhood social capital is believed to influence the association between neighbourhood deprivation and health in childr...