Neighbourhood Effect Studies of Subjective and Objective Wellbeing (2002-2018)

The literature review database contains information about neighbourhood effects on objective wellbeing and subjective wellbeing. The review was conducted as part of the research project "Investigating people-place effects in the UK", funded by the Nuffield Foundation. For further details on the project, visit the project website: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/projects/investigating-people-place-effects-in-the-uk-using-linked-longitudinal-survey-and-administrative-data

Applying a strict search and review protocol, 684 candidate studies (published between 1.1.2002 and 09.02.2018) were identified using the Google scholar search engine, entering the search terms “neighbourhood effects” and “income”, “earnings”, “employment”, “unemployment”, “happiness”, “life satisfaction”, or “health”. Ninety-one studies fulfilled the eligibility criteria for detailed review – i.e. they are empirical papers focusing on contemporaneous neighbourhood effects in a general population sample, and were published English.

The review database includes detailed information about:
• the nature of the neighbourhood effect mechanism(s) studied;
• the information used to capture the neighbourhood effect, including the source of the neighbourhood data;
• how the neighbourhood is operationalised, including whether the boundaries are respondent-defined or administrative, how large the units are, and any socio-economic or demographic descriptors of the place and its people;
• the methods applied to address residential selection bias, coded to eleven types of strategies ranging from attempts to capture residential selection bias through observed individual and neighbourhood characteristics to fully modelling residential selection.