Neighborhood economic conditions, social processes, and self-rated health in low-income neighborhoods in Texas: A multilevel latent variables model
Section snippets
Background
Neighborhood socioeconomic conditions are known to affect health after controlling for individual demographics and socioeconomic status (SES). Although it has been proposed that neighborhood social processes and physical conditions mediate the effect of neighborhood impoverishment on health, there is only scant empirical evidence on these associations. It is also not clear what are the pathways through which neighborhood social processes and physical conditions affect individual health.
This
Neighborhood context and health
Recent years have seen an explosion in the study of neighborhood environments and their influence on population health. Neighborhood contextual effects have been found after controlling for individual factors such as age, race/ethnicity, income, education, social class, or baseline health status. All the studies reviewed in this section documenting contextual effects on individual health control for some individual characteristics. The several dimensions of neighborhood environments which have
Participants
Data for this study were drawn from surveys obtained as part of a project exploring social context and health in Texas neighborhoods funded by the Texas Department of Health. The study was conducted in 13 low/medium income communities in Texas between June 2001 and August 2002. Eleven communities were in the Houston area and two in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The communities in Houston were selected to represent both older, established residential neighborhoods as well as more recently
Demographics and neighborhood level variation
Twenty-eight percent of the sample was Black, and 59% was Hispanic. Three out of four respondents were female, and a little less than half the sample was living below the federal poverty level. Approximately half the sample had participated in physical activity during the last month and had at least three close friends and relatives. More than 60% of the sample had lived in their neighborhood for 5 or more years. Neighborhoods were mainly poor, with half of them having poverty rates over 27%
Discussion
The results of this study indicate that individual self-rated health is affected by a complex interplay of neighborhood characteristics, even after controlling for differences in individual factors. The data are consistent with the hypothesized model where the effect of neighborhood poverty on individual health is mediated by social and physical processes. Consistently with the literature, social capital, measured by trust and norms of reciprocity was associated negatively with impoverishment
Acknowledgement
This study was part of a project funded by a Texas Department of Health Innovation Grant (2000–2003) and was approved by Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (HSC-SPH-00-064). We are indebted to Norma Perez and Melissa Montoya for coordinating the data collection, to Arlene Keddie for help in literature searches, and to Ben Amick, John Ribble, and Jan Risser who contributed to the project.
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