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New Horizons in Health An Integrative Approach (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Collective Properties and Healthy Communities
Pages 91-99

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From page 91...
... For example, the ecological concentration of poverty correlates to infant mortality, low birth weight, child maltreatment, and adolescent violence as well as depression, homicide, victimization, cardiovascular diseases, and all-cause mortality. At the other end of the spectrum, communities with high socioeconomic status appear to promote health in both children and adults.
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From page 92...
... The ecological concentration of homicide, low birth weight, infant mortality, and injury indicates that there may be geographic "hot spots" for unhealthy outcomes. Not only do social characteristics vary systematically with health across communities, a growing body of contextually oriented research has linked community social characteristics with variations in individual-level health.
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From page 93...
... · A number of health problems tend to cluster together at the neighborhood and larger community levels, including but not limited to violence, low birth weight, infant mortality, child maltreatment, and the risk of premature adult death. · These two phenomena are themselves related; community-level predictors common to many health-related outcomes include concentrated poverty and/or affluence, racial segregation, family disruption, residential instability, and poor-quality housing.
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From page 94...
... If multiple and seemingly disparate health outcomes are linked together empirically across communities and are predicted by similar characteristics, there may be common underlying causes or mediating mechanisms. In particular, if "neighborhood effects" of concentrated poverty on health exist, presumably they stem from social processes that involve collective aspects of neighborhood life, such as social cohesion, spatial diffusion, local support networks, informal social control, and subcultures of violence.
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From page 95...
... A central challenge in this regard is to build strategies for direct measurement of the social mechanisms and collective properties hypothesized to predict health. As interest in the social sciences turns increasingly to an integrated scientific approach that emphasizes individual factors in social context, a mismatch has arisen in the quality of measures (Raudenbush and Sampson, 1999~.
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From page 96...
... , voucher programs, and dispersion of concentrated poverty. By integrating econometric strategies for collecting theoretically relevant data on the collective properties of social environments with the random assignment of individuals to new social contexts, researchers are in a better position to sort out selection mechanisms and social causation mechanisms in health outcomes.
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From page 97...
... Although in its infancy, we believe that the multilevel study of developmental and community processes related to health is a crucial research frontier that deserves priority. OTHER SOCIAL CONTEXTS To be sure, health environments are not limited to geographical communities.
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From page 98...
... RECOMMENDATIONS We recommend a coordinated effort in the institutes to investigate the collective properties of social environments that extant research suggests are promising for a deeper understanding of the etiology of health outcomes and for the development of community-based prevention strategies. Because community contexts are important units of analysis in their own right, they call for concrete strategies that have heretofore been neglected in the institutes.
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From page 99...
... 1999 "'Ecometrics': Toward a science of assessing ecological settings, with application to the systematic social observation of neighborhoods" Sociological Methodology 29:1-41. Robert SA.
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Key Terms

  • birth weight
  • low birth
  • socioeconomic status
  • infant mortality
  • social processes

  • social environments
  • community contexts
  • american journal
  • community social
  • social control

  • concentrated poverty
  • collective efficacy
  • support networks
  • alameda county
  • body mass

  • social characteristics
  • informal social
  • local support
  • healthy communities
  • mass index

  • social cohesion
  • social environment
  • poor health
  • social contexts
  • risk factors

  • community context
  • caring community
  • leaders roundtable
  • boston mto
  • benchmark data


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