Goldman-Mellor Sidra, Margerison-Zilko Claire, Allen Kristina, Cerda Magdalena
Department of Public Health; School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts; University of California, Merced, 5200 N. Lake Rd, Merced, CA, 95343, USA.
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA.
J Urban Health. 2016 Oct;93(5):758-769. doi: 10.1007/s11524-016-0079-0.
Prior research examining links between neighborhood violence and mental health has not been able to establish whether it is perceived levels of neighborhood violence, or actual levels of violent crime, that matter most for adolescents' psychological well-being. In this study, we ascertained both perceived neighborhood safety and objectively-measured neighborhood-level violent crime (using a novel geospatial index of police-reported crime incidents) for 4464 adolescent respondents from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS 2011-2014). We used propensity score-matched regression models to examine associations between these measures and CHIS adolescents' symptoms of psychological distress. We found that adolescents who perceived their neighborhood to be unsafe were two times more likely than those who perceived their neighborhood to be safe to report serious psychological distress (OR = 2.4, 95 % CI = 1.20, 4.96). Adolescents who lived in areas objectively characterized by high levels of violent crime, however, were no more likely than their peers in safer areas to be distressed (OR = 1.41; 95 % CI = 0.60, 3.32). Our results suggest that, at the population level, adolescents' perceptions of neighborhood violence, rather than objective levels of neighborhood crime, are most salient for their mental health.
先前关于邻里暴力与心理健康之间联系的研究未能确定，对于青少年的心理健康而言，最重要的是对邻里暴力的感知程度，还是暴力犯罪的实际发生率。在本研究中，我们从加利福尼亚健康访谈调查（2011 - 2014年CHIS）的4464名青少年受访者中，确定了他们对邻里安全的感知以及客观测量的邻里层面暴力犯罪情况（使用警方报告犯罪事件的新型地理空间指数）。我们使用倾向得分匹配回归模型来检验这些指标与CHIS青少年心理困扰症状之间的关联。我们发现，认为自己所在邻里不安全的青少年报告严重心理困扰的可能性是认为邻里安全的青少年的两倍（OR = 2.4，95% CI = 1.20，4.96）。然而，生活在客观上暴力犯罪率高的地区的青少年，与生活在更安全地区的同龄人相比，出现心理困扰的可能性并没有更高（OR = 1.41；95% CI = 0.60，3.32）。我们的研究结果表明，在总体人群层面，青少年对邻里暴力的感知，而非邻里犯罪的客观水平，对他们的心理健康最为重要。
