Neighbourhoods and Health. Kawachi I and Berkman LF (eds). New York: Oxford University Press Inc, USA, 2003, pp. 320,  39.50. ISBN 0195138384

Abstract

Neighborhoods and Health edited by Ichiro Kawachi and Lisa F Berkman can be seen as a companion to their 2000 volume Social Epidemiology.1 This book provides for neighbourhoods and health what their previous book did for the social environment and health, bringing together a wide range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical research from a group of authors prominent in the ‘new generation of neighbourhood level research’ (Sampson, p. 132) in the USA and UK.What are ‘neighbourhoods’ and why is there an increasing academic interest in how they affect health? The growing popularity of neighbourhoods in part reflects the recent interest in health inequalities research in social networks and social capital in communities. Much of this book presents neighbourhoods as the locations of communities, conceptualizing them as networks of social relationships, and explores the significance of these relationships to health. Neighbourhoods are also presented in this volume as statistical units for quantitative measurement and manipulation in multi-level models. The development of this aspect of neighbourhood research has been encouraged by the availability of new computational techniques and has centred on the ongoing ‘context’ vs ‘composition’ debate. This debate has considered the extent to which spatial variations in health outcomes are the product of variations in the people that live in the areas (individual or composition effects) or the places themselves (area or context effects). Many neighbourhood health researchers have been keen to prove that the contextual characteristics of neighbourhoods have ‘independent’ effects upon health.