Child well-being and neighbourhood quality: evidence from the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth
Section snippets
Introduction and background
Interest in the links between neighbourhood quality and health has burgeoned in the last decade. Studies of this relationship for pre-schoolers, adolescents and adults include Ginther, Haveman, and Wolfe (2000), Ellen and Turner (1997), Mayer (1996) and Jencks and Mayer (1990). Few studies consider children from ages 6 to 10, an exception being McCulloch and Joshi (2001). Ellen and Turner (1997) purport that, neighbourhoods would likely play ‘an increasingly important role during elementary
Data
The Canadian NLSCY surveyed the families of a representative sample of 22,831 children, who were aged 0–11 years in 1994. The NLSCY is a prospective longitudinal survey designed to offer representative information on the development, health and well-being of Canadian children. A full description of the data is available elsewhere (Statistics Canada and Human Resources Development Canada, 1995). The weights used in our analysis reflect the complex stratified sampling methodology. We report
Neighbourhoods and child well-being: a descriptive analysis
Table 1 contains the frequency distribution of each measure of neighbourhood quality. (Table 8 of Appendix A presents means and standard deviations.) The “cohesion” variable in the first row ranges in value from 0 to 15 and higher values indicate “greater cohesion”. Most Canadian children live in reasonably cohesive neighbourhoods in that the sample mean is 10.8 and 74% of scores are from 10 to 15. Only 1.9% of the scores are under 5.
“Problems” as reported by the PMK are reported in the second
Discussion
The basic conclusion of this paper is that lower-quality neighbourhoods are generally associated with poorer outcomes for children. This result was obtained over various outcome measures (emotional, behavioural, and physical), and neighbourhood quality measures (safety, cohesiveness, and problems). We also used information from two respondents and found that parental assessment of neighbourhood quality usually yields stronger results than does interviewer assessment. Our finding that
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Emmanuelle Pierard for excellent research assistance. Dooley acknowledges the financial support of the National Health Research Development Program of Health Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Helpful comments were provided by Peter Burton, Teresa Cyrus, Lars Osberg and Frances Woolley.
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