Measuring Childhood Exposure to Neighbourhood Deprivation at the Macro- and Micro-level in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Neighbourhood effects research has benefited from the application of sequence analysis which, together with cluster analysis, identifies the main temporal patterns of exposure to residential contexts experienced by different groups of people, such as children. However, given that this is a relatively new approach to measuring exposure to neighbourhood deprivation, studies that have utilised sequence analysis to model residential trajectories and test for neighbourhood effects do not contextualise these population-level findings at the individual-level. The current study sought to investigate the patterns of exposure to neighbourhood deprivation experienced by children in Aotearoa New Zealand over the first eight years of life by utilising two different methodological approaches: at the macro-level, the results of the sequence and cluster analysis suggest that in general, children experienced little neighbourhood mobility; at the micro-level, children experienced greater levels of movement between different levels of neighbourhood deprivation in middle childhood, compared to early childhood, while children in the least and most deprived neighbourhoods experienced less mobility than their peers. Together, these findings provide a comprehensive description of the ways in which children are exposed to different residential contexts over time and advance our understandings of how to document these experiences effectively within quantitative research.