La Follette School of Public Affairs, Department of Sociology, Institute for Research on Poverty, Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Apr 24;14(4):e0213204. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213204. eCollection 2019.
A straightforward technique to explore the "total effects" of neighborhoods on health outcomes is to compare the degree of similarity of outcomes of neighbors with those of non-neighbors. Several issues arise in interpreting these estimates around spatial and temporal definitions of "neighbors" and life course mobility patterns. Indeed, much work uses "cross- sectional neighbors," which makes the interpretation of the estimates unclear because they combine short-term effects (for movers) and long-term effects (for stayers). This paper contributes to the literature by assessing the importance of measuring neighbor mobility as well as neighborhood selection. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we examine the extent to which having longitudinal measures of "neighbors" shapes estimates of neighborhood effects, and also use a negative test of neighborhood effects to assess the importance of neighborhood selection. Specifically, we estimate similarity in self-rated health of adults over 30 years old who live in the same county over various periods of time and find that "cross-sectional" neighbor definitions may understate neighborhood effect estimates by as much as 35%. However, when we contrast these health estimates with contemporaneous neighborhood "effects" on completed education, we find that much of the "understated" effects on health are likely related to selection effects rather than causal effects of neighborhoods.
一种直接的方法来探索邻里对健康结果的“总效应”是比较邻居和非邻居的结果的相似程度。在解释这些估计时，会出现一些问题，这些问题涉及到“邻居”的空间和时间定义以及生命历程流动性模式。实际上，许多工作使用“横截面邻居”，这使得估计的解释不清楚，因为它们结合了短期效应（对迁居者而言）和长期效应（对留守者而言）。本文通过评估测量邻居流动性和邻里选择的重要性，为文献做出了贡献。我们使用收入动态面板研究，考察了邻里的纵向衡量对邻里效应估计的影响程度，还使用邻里效应的负检验来评估邻里选择的重要性。具体来说，我们估计了在同一县居住超过 30 年的 30 岁以上成年人的自评健康的相似性，并发现“横截面”邻居定义可能低估了多达 35%的邻里效应估计值。然而，当我们将这些健康估计与同期邻里对完成教育的“影响”进行对比时，我们发现健康方面的“低估”影响可能与选择效应有关，而不是邻里的因果效应。
