Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2019How can neighborhood environment affect residents’ mental health and well-being? In the broad context of understanding this mechanism, this dissertation focuses on the residents’ social relationships based on the neighborhood and their effects on mental health and well-being. Concentrating on the experiences of the apartment residents in Pangyo, Seoul metropolitan area, Korea, this study discusses and seeks answers to the following questions: 1) what are the nature/characteristics (essences) of experienced local social relationships of residents in the neighborhood which consists of multi-layered high-rise apartment complexes; 2) how do spatial characteristics of such residential settings contribute to the experiences of local social relationships; and 3) how do residents’ experiences of local social relationships from their everyday living environment contribute to their mental health and well-being. Through a phenomenological research, including dialogical-conversational interviews and thematic analysis, the discourse of twenty-eight women residents about their years of experiences in the neighborhood were explored. Except for the relations established through local institutions, participants formed their relations with their neighbors by repetitively encountering them in and around the apartment complexes. The spatial settings of apartment complexes, however, did not actively support these place-based encounters because of the highly compartmentalized spatial structures with a short moving line. Thus, the places of possible encounters were generally limited to the common use spaces which participants had to pass through in the course of their everyday lives — such as the elevators, and the entrance areas of the buildings and the underground parking lots. The local social relations experienced by participants have both positive and negative effects on their mental health and well-being. In other words, local social relationships are multifaceted and have complex relationship with health. Participants found that the existence of neighbors and interactions with them contributed to their mental health and well-being. They received emotional social support, which helped them cope with daily stress and keep positive mood, from their intimate neighbors and generally positive relationships with neighbors. They also received diverse instrumental support from their local social networks thanks to the physical proximity and related immediacy. Participants had mostly shallow relationships with their neighbors and further they had generally low sense of belonging to their everyday living place, but these experiences did not seem to have strong effects on their mental health and well-being within the socioeconomic context of this neighborhood. However, the superficiality of social relationships which primarily centered around participants’ children rather than themselves, was experienced as stressful. These relations seemed to have negative effects on mental well-being, interlinking with the competitive children education and related comparisons. The general social comparisons between neighbors, beyond the education issue, also made participants feel inferiority and stressful
