Abstract
The present study evaluated possible mediators of the association between perceived neighborhood characteristics and wellbeing. Both objective: social participation, community engagement, and number of chronic conditions and subjective: loneliness, perceived discrimination, and subjective health indicators were examined as possible mediators. The health and retirement study is a longitudinal panel survey consisting of a representative sample of US citizens over the age of 50. Analysis was based on data collected in 2010, 2014, and 2018. A total of 5590–5851 participants were included in the analyses. Path models were conducted to examine mediation, using 5000 bootstraps. Even after controlling for sociodemographic variables, there was a significant association between perceived neighborhood characteristics measured in 2010 and wellbeing measured in 2018. This association was partially mediated by loneliness, perceived discrimination, and subjective health measured in 2014, but not by community engagement, social participation, and number of chronic conditions. In a sensitivity analysis, some of the objective indicators partially accounted for the relationship between perceived neighborhood characteristics and the subjective indicators. The findings point to the importance of subjective mediators, rather than objective ones in explaining the association between perceived neighborhood characteristics and wellbeing. Hence, they call for further attention to the subjective characteristics of the neighborhood as important to older persons’ wellbeing.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 102020 |
| Journal | Journal of Environmental Psychology |
| Volume | 88 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023 Elsevier Ltd
Funding
There is a growing body of research demonstrating an association between perceived neighborhood characteristics and loneliness. Perceiving one's neighbors as trustworthy and helpful has been associated with decreased loneliness and increased perceived social support from friends at the four-year follow-up interview in a representative sample of US citizens over the age of 50 (Yang & Moorman, 2021). Others have shown that positive perceptions of the neighborhood's built environment are associated with lower levels of loneliness, but have no such association with major depressive disorder (Domènech-Abella et al., 2020). A cross-sectional sample of Hong Kong residents has found that higher levels of neighborhood social cohesion are associated with overall loneliness and with social loneliness, and vary across subjective social status (Yu et al., 2021). A survey of 917 people in New Zealand has found that neighborhood characteristics are associated with both emotional and social loneliness. This association was partially mediated by the type of social network (Stephens & Phillips, 2022). Data from 182 adults, age 65 and older in the Netherlands has shown that feelings of loneliness are directly related to satisfaction with one's neighborhood and neighborhood attachment and indirectly related to perceived safety and satisfaction with local amenities and services (Kemperman et al., 2019). Another study has found that loneliness is associated with perceived negative neighborhood disorder, but not with its objective characteristics, suggesting that loneliness contributes to biased perceptions of one's environment, rather than a result of the perceived environment's characteristics (Matthews et al., 2019).
Keywords
- Mental health
- Neighborhood cohesion
- Neighborhood disorder
- Objective
- Subjective
- Wellbeing
