The impact of regional and neighbourhood deprivation on physical health in Germany: a multilevel study

Voigtländer S, Berger U, Razum O. The impact of regional and neighbourhood deprivation on physical health in Germany: a multilevel study. BMC Public Health. 2010;10(1): 403.Background There is increasing evidence that individual health is at least partly determined by neighbourhood and regional factors. Mechanisms, however, remain poorly understood, and evidence from Germany is scant. This study explores whether regional as well as neighbourhood deprivation are associated with physical health and to what extent this association can be explained by specific neighbourhood exposures. Methods Using 2004 data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) merged with regional and neighbourhood characteristics, we fitted multilevel linear regression models with subjective physical health, as measured by the SF-12, as the dependent variable. The models include regional and neighbourhood proxies of deprivation (i.e. regional unemployment quota, average purchasing power of the street section) as well as specific neighbourhood exposures (i.e. perceived air pollution). Individual characteristics including socioeconomic status and health behaviour have been controlled for. Results This study finds a significant association between area deprivation and physical health which is independent of compositional factors and consistent across different spatial scales. Furthermore the association between neighbourhood deprivation and physical health can be partly explained by specific features of the neighbourhood environment. Among these perceived air pollution shows the strongest association with physical health (-2.4 points for very strong and -1.5 points for strong disturbance by air pollution, standard error (SE) = 0.8 and 0.4, respectively). Beta coefficients for perceived air pollution, perceived noise and the perceived distance to recreational resources do not diminish when including individual health behaviour in the models. Conclusions This study highlights the difference regional and in particular neighbourhood deprivation make to the physical health of individuals in Germany. The results support the argument that specific neighbourhood exposures serve as an intermediary step between deprivation and health. As people with a low socioeconomic status were more likely to be exposed to unfavourable neighbourhood characteristics these conditions plausibly contribute towards generating health inequalities

Internal Migration - Challenges and Perspectives for the Research Infrastructure

Research on internal migration covers a wide range of issues with regard to the reasons, distance and direction of moves as well as the process of decision-making. Given the rich field of relevant research objectives and the substantial developments in migration theory it is apparent that the availability of a broad set of data including detailed information on various aspects of life is one of the key factors for ongoing progress in the analysis of internal migration development. Available official aggregated data are useful for descriptive structural analyses. But they are very limited in explaining causal relations. The same holds for cross-sectional data. Some of the described longitudinal data sets consist of retrospective collected event history data that are not suitable for collecting essential information about attitudes and psychological states of the respondents over time. Several prospective longitudinal survey data do not represent essential aspects of internal migration. Data should at least include information on the place of residence (on the smallest possible spatial level), typologies about the characteristics of the place of residence, change of residence, reasons of a move, intentions to move, the dwelling and the neighbourhood as well as on commuting