Longitudinal exposure assessments of neighbourhood effects in health research: What can be learned from people's residential histories?

Inequalities of Suicide Mortality across Urban and Rural Areas: A Literature Review

“…Cautious communication to the public is essential to ensure a proper understanding of the results and any limitations in the data. Progress can be achieved through research designs at the individual level, including case-control [ 72 ] and cohort studies [ 73 ]. Relatedly, future studies also need to acknowledge that people move home over their life course [ 74 ].…”

Life Course Neighbourhood Deprivation and Self-Rated Health: Does It Matter Where You Lived in Adolescence and Do Neighbourhood Effects Build Up over Life?

“…Yang and South [ 6 ] group neighbourhood poverty rates for US census tracts using latent class analysis; Prior [ 10 ] groups LSOAs by Townsend deprivation scores also using latent class analysis; Kivimaki et al [ 11 ] group 250 m grid squares by a composite measure of unemployment, social renting and education by severity; Clarke et al [ 7 ] use principal component factor scores for US census tracts from nine indicators; Gustafsson [ 8 , 9 ] use summed scores for Swedish small area market statistics areas from eight indicators. The studies which suggest concurrent neighbourhood deprivation is a stronger determinant of health have not measured residential history before adulthood and measure cause-specific mortality of working age populations [ 3 , 13 ], both of which make it difficult to determine a life course effect of neighbourhood deprivation on health.…”

“…There is a growing evidence-base suggesting it is not simply where you live today, rather your cumulative neighbourhood history; considering duration of exposure to a neighbourhood and the impact of both in situ neighbourhood change and migration between neighbourhoods. It is important to take account of neighbourhood histories because people may remain connected to neighbourhoods they have previously lived in by way of at least two of the processes identified by Galster [ 2 ] in a seminal paper on how neighbourhood can causally affect individual outcomes: through (1) continued social ties with family and friends and (2) institutional ties with schools and other services in a previous neighbourhood [ 3 ]. Here, we focus on neighbourhood socioeconomic deprivation often measured through a composite of indicators (e.g., unemployment, overcrowding, household tenure and education) or a single item (e.g., income or unemployment) and provide a summary of the evidence on how exposure to more deprived neighbourhoods over time impacts on health.…”

“…The association was only significant in 2007 when comparing concurrent measures of poor neighbourhood quality separately. Hagedoor and Helbich [ 3 ] and Pearson et al [ 13 ] also suggest concurrent neighbourhood is a stronger determinant of health when also taking into account a cumulative measure of neighbourhood deprivation. Hagedoor and Helbich used Dutch register data on neighbourhood histories of people aged 40–64 and their unemployment rate over 15 years, and found those living in 300 metre square buffers with higher unemployment are less likely to commit suicide compared with those living in neighbourhoods with lower unemployment.…”

Familiar Faces, Worn Out Places: The Effect of Personal and Place Prosperity On Well-Being

“…(Quasi) experimental research designs show that children and adults who move to better neighbourhoods have better health outcomes (Chetty et al 2016;Chetty and Hendren 2018a,b;Leventhal and Dupéré 2019;Chyn and Katz 2021). For adults, there is evidence that areas have a cumulative impact on health outcomes over time but this finding is not universal (Jivraj et al 2020;Hagedoorn and Helbich 2021). I now turn to how places impact well-being domains at the labour market and neighbourhood levels.…”