Baker Emma, Beer Andrew, Lester Laurence, Pevalin David, Whitehead Christine, Bentley Rebecca
School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Adelaide, Adelaide 5005, Australia.
University of South Australia Business School, Adelaide 5000, Australia.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2017 May 26;14(6):567. doi: 10.3390/ijerph14060567.
In seeking to understand the relationship between housing and health, research attention is often focussed on separate components of people's whole housing 'bundles'. We propose in this paper that such conceptual and methodological abstraction of elements of the housing and health relationship limits our ability to understand the scale of the accumulated effect of housing on health and thereby contributes to the under-recognition of adequate housing as a social policy tool and powerful health intervention. In this paper, we propose and describe an index to capture the means by which housing bundles influence health. We conceptualise the index as reflecting accumulated housing 'insults to health'-an Index of Housing Insults (IHI). We apply the index to a sample of 1000 low-income households in Australia. The analysis shows a graded association between housing insults and health on all outcome measures. Further, after controlling for possible confounders, the IHI is shown to provide additional predictive power to the explanation of levels of mental health, general health and clinical depression beyond more traditional proxy measures. Overall, this paper reinforces the need to look not just at separate housing components but to embrace a broader understanding of the relationship between housing and health.
在试图理解住房与健康之间的关系时，研究注意力往往集中在人们整个住房“组合”的各个单独组成部分上。我们在本文中提出，对住房与健康关系要素的这种概念和方法上的抽象限制了我们理解住房对健康累积影响规模的能力，从而导致对适足住房作为一种社会政策工具和有力的健康干预措施认识不足。在本文中，我们提出并描述了一个指数，以捕捉住房组合影响健康的方式。我们将该指数概念化为反映累积的住房“健康损害”——住房损害指数（IHI）。我们将该指数应用于澳大利亚1000户低收入家庭的样本。分析表明，在所有结果指标上，住房损害与健康之间存在分级关联。此外，在控制了可能的混杂因素后，与更传统的替代指标相比，住房损害指数被证明在解释心理健康、总体健康和临床抑郁症水平方面具有额外的预测能力。总体而言，本文强调不仅要关注单独的住房组成部分，而且要更全面地理解住房与健康之间的关系。
