CoDE Seminar: Neighbourhood Effects on Individual Wellbeing
| Dates: | 20 June 2019 |
|---|
| Times: | 12:00 - 13:00 |
|---|
| What is it: | Seminar |
|---|
| Organiser: | Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) |
|---|
| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students |
|---|
| Speaker: | Dr Gundi Knies |
|---|
|
There is a long history of research in the role of place in shaping individuals’ economic and social life chances, and the number of empirical papers on this topic is on the rise. Albeit, there is considerable debate whether neighbourhood effects exist, how important they are and how we can measure them. Although there has been some progress in addressing the paramount challenges of selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity since the seminal methodological reviews from the early 2000s, progress is concentrated among studies that focus on objective wellbeing outcomes. There also still is a stark tendency for quantitative papers to describe statistically significant associations between neighbourhood contexts and individual outcomes without testing (or specifying) the causal mechanisms that may lie behind observed neighbourhood effects, and this is more prevalent among studies that focus on objective wellbeing outcomes; and studies use a wide range of spatial scales, with those looking at subjective outcomes focussing, on average, on more immediate and sociologically more meaningful units, and being somewhat more specific about the causal mechanisms involved. In this paper we present a longitudinal analysis of neighbourhood deprivation effects on individual wellbeing, exploiting data from the first six waves of Understanding Society linked with longitudinally harmonised Census data for 2001 and 2011 for bespoke neighbourhoods. We focus on prominent subjective and objective wellbeing outcomes (e.g., life satisfaction, mental health and physical health, and hourly wage) and examine whether the effect of neighbourhood deprivation on wellbeing may be driven by unobserved individual characteristics and neighbourhood choice. Preliminary results suggest that area deprivation is important for all wellbeing outcomes but this is mostly explained by unobserved individual factors (such as residential choice). There is no discernible difference in the neighbourhood effect across different neighbourhood scales (here: aggregations of UK Census Output Areas covering from 500 to 10k people around the respondents’ home postcode). More effect heterogeneity – both across outcomes and scales – is found when unobserved neighbourhood characteristics are additionally considered.
Speaker
Dr Gundi Knies
Organisation: The University of Essex
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Room 2.07
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
