People who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods tend to have poor physical and mental health, but this might be due to selective residential mobility rather than causal neighborhood effects. As a test of social causation, I examined whether persons were less healthy when they were living in disadvantaged neighborhoods than at other times when they were living in more advantaged neighborhoods. Da...

We examined the relationship between neighborhood structural characteristics and mental disorder using data from the National Institute of Mental Health's Epidemiological Catchment (ECA) surveys (n = 11,686). After controlling for individual-level characteristics, we found that neighborhood disadvantage was associated with higher rates of major depression and substance abuse disorder, and that ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the relationship between the physical and social attributes of the neighborhood environment and levels of total physical activity (PA), leisure time PA, and active commuting PA in adults. METHODS The present cross-sectional study comprised 1500 adults (51.1% women) aged 15-74 years from the Autonomous Region of Madrid (Spain). Data were collected through a structured telep...

Prior research on the contextual determinants of black racial attitudes has focused on the effects of residential segregation while overlooking differences in the socioeconomic character of neighborhoods. I posit that socioeconomic environments, in particular, the quality and socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods, may affect whether blacks view race as a defining interest in their lives. I...

BACKGROUND Social support is frequently linked to positive parenting behavior. Similarly, studies increasingly show a link between neighborhood residential environment and positive parenting behavior. However, less is known about how the residential environment influences parental social support. To address this gap, we examine the relationship between neighborhood concentrated disadvantage and...

Intergenerational Education Transmission: Neighborhood Quality and/or Parents’ Involvement? We develop a model that analyzes the impact of residential neighborhood and parents’ involvement in education on children’s educational attainment and test it using the UK National Child Development Study. We find that the better the quality of the neighborhood, the higher the parents’ involvement in chi...

We investigate the dynamic relationship between residential choices of individuals and resulting long-term aggregate segregation patterns, allowing for feedback effects of macrolevel neighborhood conditions on residential choices. We reinterpret past survey data on whites' attitudes about desired neighborhoods as revealing large heterogeneity in whites' tolerance of black neighbors. Through age...

Why do employers discriminate against job applicants who reside in poor, distant neighborhoods? Previous research indicates that employers call back applicants from these neighborhoods at lower rates, but the motivation for employer discrimination based on residential neighborhood remains unclear. Employers could be responding to long commuting distances, which could lead to higher employee abs...

In this paper we focus on gaining insight into the residential satisfaction of households near highways, based on survey data collected among 1,225 respondents in the Netherlands living within 1,000 meters from a highway. Ordinal regression was used to study the impact of highway externalities on residential satisfaction. Moreover, we gained first insights into the reactions of people on highwa...

BACKGROUND Studies involving the built environment have typically relied on US Census data to measure residential density. However, census geographic units are often unsuited to health-related research, especially in rural areas where development is clustered and discontinuous. OBJECTIVE We evaluated the accuracy of both standard census methods and alternative GIS-based methods to measure rur...