Does the longitudinal association between neighbourhood cohesion and mental health differ by ethnicity? Results from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey

Antony Chum, Celine Teo and Karanpreet Kaur Azra

No uj6wa, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Purpose While the association between neighbourhood cohesion and mental health has been widely studied in the general population, the effects of neighbourhood cohesion across ethnic groups is not well understood. Ethnicity is often left out of study design, many studies do not consider effect modification by ethnicity, or they rely on overly simplistic ethnic categories. Methods Data from the UK household longitudinal study was used to investigate whether changes in neighbourhood cohesion is independently associated with changes in mental health (measured using the GHQ) over 9 years (2009 to 2018), and whether the association differed across 17 ethnic groups. The study used a fixed-effect modelling approach that includes within-person estimators that allows each participant to act as their own control. Results Compared to British white, the following ethnic groups all saw a similar improvement in GHQ (-0.76, 95% CI -0.83 to -0.70) for each point increase in neighbourhood cohesion: Irish, any other White, White and Asian mixed, Chinese, Caribbean, African, any other Black, Arab, and others. Some ethnic groups saw stronger improvements in mental for each point increase in neighbourhood cohesion, including White and Black Caribbean mixed, any other mixed, Indian, Pakistani, any other Asian, with the strongest effect seen in Bangladeshi participants (-2.52. 95% CI -3.48 to -1.56). Conclusion Our study highlights the importance of ethnocultural data in research examining neighbourhood effects on mental health. Future research should evaluate policies to improve neighbourhood cohesion for ethnic minorities to address ethnic mental health disparities.

Date: 2020-11-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5f9c58ba101721041da44075/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:uj6wa

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/uj6wa

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().