Analyses of health over time must consider the potential impacts of ageing as well as any effects relating to cohort differences. The British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and Understanding Society longitudinal studies are employed to assess trends in mental ill-health over a 26-year period. This analysis uses cross-classified multilevel models in an exploratory, non-parametric approach to evaluate age and cohort effects net of each other. Mental ill-health evidences an initial worsening trend as people age which then reverses and exhibits improvement in late-middle-age, before declining again in the latter stages of life. There were less defined cohort trends. The modelling technique also reveals the relative importance of the temporal contexts in relation to inter- and intra-individual effects on mental ill-health, demonstrating that the ageing and cohort dimensions explain little variation compared to these more dominant within and between influences. Ultimately, we suggest that researchers would benefit from wider use of this exploratory modelling strategy when evaluating underlying health trends and more research is now needed to explore potential explanations of these baseline trajectories.

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There has been a growing appreciation that the processes generating urban residential segregation operate at multiple scales, stimulating innovations into the measurement of their outcomes. This paper applies a multi‐level modelling approach to that issue to the situation in Auckland, where multiple migration streams from both Pacific Island and Asian origins have created a complex multi‐ethnic city. We identify two distinct trends. For the larger ethnic groups segregation remained static despite rapid growth over a recent twelve‐year period. For the smaller groups growth has been combined with considerable change; they initially clustered in a few localities and areas within them but then experienced considerable reduction in the intensity of that segregation. By spatially decomposing the segregation levels, this paper extends our appreciation of its underpinning processes when they apply to migration streams that differ in their nature from those on which traditional residential location‐decision theory has been based.@en

Traditional studies of residential segregation use a descriptive index approach with predefined spatial units to report the degree of neighbourhood differentiation. We develop a model-based approach which explicitly includes spatial effects at multiple scales, recognising the complexity of the urban environment while simultaneously distinguishing segregation at each scale net of all other scales. Moreover, this model distinguishes segregation as unevenness and as spatial clustering in the presence of stochastic variation. The modelling approach, unlike traditional index approaches, allows hypothesis evaluation concerning alternative scales and zonation through an accompanying badness-of-fit measure. Ultimately, this permits the identification of the scale and zonation regime where the spatial patterns come into focus thereby directly tackling the modifiable areal unit problem. The model is applied to Indian ethnicity in Leicester, UK, finding segregation as unevenness and as spatial clustering at multiple scales.@en

Deprived neighbourhoods have long been associated with poorer health outcomes. However, many quantitative studies have not evidenced the mechanisms through which place ‘gets under the skin’ to influence health. The increasing prevalence of biosocial data provides new opportunities to explore these mechanisms and incorporate them into models of contextual effects. The stress pathway is a key biosocial mechanism; however, few studies have explicitly tested it in neighbourhood associations. This paper addresses this gap by investigating whether allostatic load, a biological response to chronic stress, mediates relationships of neighbourhood deprivation to physical and mental health. Data from UK Understanding Society is used to undertaken a multilevel mediation analysis. Allostatic load is found to mediate the association between neighbourhood deprivation and health, substantiating the biological mechanism of the stress pathway. More deprived areas are associated with higher allostatic load, and in turn worse allostatic load relates to poorer physical and mental health. Allostatic load is a stronger mediator of physical health than mental health, suggesting the stress pathway is more pertinent to explaining physical health gradients. Heterogeneity in the results between physical and mental health suggests more research is needed to disentangle the biosocial processes that could be important to health and place relationships.

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