Childhood neighborhoods and health in later Life: Hospital admissions in Sweden 1939–2015

Finn Hedefalk, Ingrid K. van Dijk and Martin Dribe

Social Science & Medicine, 2025, vol. 381, issue C

Abstract: We study the association between childhood neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) (ages 1–15) and hospitalization with preventable-type disease in adulthood, using geocoded longitudinal microdata for a Swedish city (1939–1967) linked to national registers (1973–2015). Observing the full residential histories at the address level for the entire population, we construct dynamic and cumulative individual neighborhoods and measure SES of parents to similarly-aged neighboring children. In the nationwide follow-up, we measure later-life health (age group 45–54) using information on hospital admissions grouped by disease preventability. Our findings show that growing up in the highest-status neighborhoods lowers the risk of hospital admission in adulthood for men, but not for women. The associations do not differ by preventability and persist after including a range of control variables. The findings demonstrate the importance of childhood neighborhood conditions for health throughout the life course.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362500632X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:socmed:v:381:y:2025:i:c:s027795362500632x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118301

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().