Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment. What matters more: Exposure to poverty or exposure to affluence?

Neighbourhood effects studies typically investigate the negative effects on individual outcomes of living in areas with concentrated poverty. The literature rarely pays attention to the potential beneficial effects of living in areas with concentrated affluence. This poverty paradigm might hinder our understanding of spatial context effects. Our paper uses individual geocoded data from the Netherlands to compare the effects of exposure to neighbourhood affluence and poverty on educational attainment within the same statistical models. Using bespoke neighbourhoods, we create individual neighbourhood histories which allow us to distinguish exposure effects from early childhood and adolescence. We follow an entire cohort born in 1995 and we measure their educational level in 2018. The results show that, in the Netherlands, neighbourhood affluence has a stronger effect on educational attainment than neighbourhood poverty for all the time periods studied. Additionally, interactions with parental education indicate that children with higher educated parents are not affected by neighbourhood poverty. These results highlight the need for more studies on the effects of concentrated affluence and can inspire anti-segregation policies.

Neighbourhood effects on health: does it matter where you draw the boundaries?

There has been considerable discussion in health geography and related areas of neighbourhood effects on health: the idea that people's health in one geographical area may be influenced not only by the composition of that area's population, but also by the area's geographical context. Hence, the healthiness or otherwise of the neighbourhood may have an important effect on local people's health. Although neighbourhoods and their boundaries are sometimes obvious to local residents, it is more common to find considerable disagreement on the size and contents of a neighbourhood. In this paper, we use British census Enumeration Districts as building blocks to construct alternative zonal systems, and experiment to see if neighbourhoods defined in different ways have similar implications for health. The well known modifiable areal unit problem shows that analytical conclusions may differ substantially according to how data are aggregated. Boundaries can be drawn to maximize equality of size, compactness of shape, homogeneity in social composition, accordance with 'natural' boundaries, and probably many other factors; which of these criteria are more effective in defining zones relevant to health? One conclusion is that the effect of neighbourhood conditions should be looked at using several different ways to define neighbourhoods, and that the size and composition of these neighbourhoods may be different in different parts of a study area.