Developing Better Measures of Neighbourhood Characteristics and Change for Use in Studies of Residential Mobility: A Case Study of Britain in the Early 2000s

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of measuring neighbourhood characteristics and change when working with individual level datasets to understand the effects of residential mobility. Currently available measures in Britain are in various respects unsuitable for this purpose. The paper explores a new indicator of small area poverty: the Unadjusted Means-tested Benefits Rate (UMBR), which divides claimants of means-tested benefits in a small area by the number of households. We describe changes in area poverty between 2001 and 2006, using UMBR. As often assumed, these are generally negligible, but small areas in Bdisadvantaged urban^and Bmulticultural city life^communities did change considerably in this period. We also link UMBR to the first three waves of the UK Millennium Cohort Study, a survey of families with children born at the beginning of the 2000s. We examine opinions about Appl. Spatial Analysis (2016) neighbourhood and find that parents living in areas of higher poverty did tend to express more negative views than those living elsewhere. Living in high poverty areas was also associated with moving home, and those families who retrospectively gave neighbourhood considerations as reasons for moving did move into areas with markedly lower poverty rates. Finally, we compare families' moving trajectories to trends in poverty within areas. We are able to show that a large proportion of families who moved to poorer neighbourhoods were at double disadvantage, as they often moved to areas with increasing poverty rates. We conclude that UMBR can be used to enhance understanding of changing neighbourhood contexts in cohort studies, at least for this period, although it still suffers from the same conceptual and technical difficulties as other available alternatives in terms of its ability to capture aspects of neighbourhood quality.

The role of neighbourhood greenspace in children's spatial working memory

“…There is little research on the extent of area change in the United Kingdom due to the limited availability of longitudinal data on areas and the lack of comparability of area boundaries and data over time (Lupton & Power, ). Nonetheless, emerging evidence suggests that area deprivation (Kontopantelis et al ., ) and other area characteristics (Gambaro, Joshi, Lupton, Fenton, & Lennon, ) do not change substantially over 10 years in the United Kingdom, at least in recent history. Fifth, we could not take into account the quality of greenspace, which may be a stronger predictor of its use and benefits.…”

Moving to a better place? Residential mobility among families with young children in the Millennium Cohort Study

“…Furthermore, subjective assessments of the quality of local neighbourhoods, reported by parents of the Millennium cohort, broadly corresponded to the hierarchy of neighbourhoods on UMBR (Gambaro et al, 2015).…”

“…Although UMBR only measures out‐of‐work benefits, it correlates well at an area level with receipt of in‐work benefits and multiple deprivation (Fenton, ; Gambaro, Joshi, Lupton, & Lennon, ) and thus, is suitable for tracking micro‐spatial changes in poverty occurring during the period examined here (2001–2006). Furthermore, subjective assessments of the quality of local neighbourhoods, reported by parents of the Millennium cohort, broadly corresponded to the hierarchy of neighbourhoods on UMBR (Gambaro et al, ).…”

“…Most importantly, they are standardised and transformed to give additional granularity in the more deprived part of the distribution. This hinders comparability of indices over time and country, as changes of the indices do not represent absolute changes in the underlying numbers (for more detail, see Gambaro, Joshi, Lupton, Fenton, & Lennon, 2015).…”

Deprivation, Healthcare Accessibility and Satisfaction: Geographical Context and Scale Implications

“…Indeed, there is broad experience in showing the relationships of deprivation and different kinds of health outcomes (Boyle et al 2001;Cabrera-Barona et al 2015;Carstairs 1995;Havard et al 2008;Lalloué et al 2013). The importance of studying contextual social disadvantages also lies in the fact that deprived neighborhoods foster negative views or low satisfaction in individuals living there (Gambaro et al 2015). Local planners and policy makers need to take action in the deprived areas identified in Quito.…”