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Neighborhood Poverty and Physical Health at Midlife: The Role of Life-Course Exposure

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Abstract

Studies of the effect of neighborhood poverty on health are dominated by research designs that measure neighborhood poverty at a single point in time, ignoring the potential influence of exposure to neighborhood poverty over the life course. Applying latent class analysis to restricted residential history data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort, we identify four trajectories of life-course exposure to high-poverty neighborhoods between adolescence and midlife and then examine how these groups differ in their physical health conditions (SF-12 score) and self-rated health at around age 40. Linear and logistic regression analyses show that life-course exposure to high-poverty neighborhoods is a stronger predictor of midlife physical health than are point-in-time measures of neighborhood poverty observed during either adolescence or midlife. Our findings suggest that a life-course approach can enhance our understanding of how neighborhood poverty affects physical health.

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Acknowledgement

We appreciate the constructive suggestions from the reviewers. We also thank the Bureau of Labor Statistics for hel** us to access the restricted data (only available via contractual arrangements). We acknowledge the support from the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, which receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24-HD044943). In addition, the corresponding author would like to acknowledge the support from the Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan) and the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica (MOST 107-2420-H-001-003-SS2).

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  1. University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA

    Tse-Chuan Yang & Scott J. South

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Correspondence to Tse-Chuan Yang.

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Yang, TC., South, S.J. Neighborhood Poverty and Physical Health at Midlife: The Role of Life-Course Exposure. J Urban Health 97, 486–501 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-020-00444-8

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