The mechanism(s) of neighbourhood effects : theory, evidence, and policy implications

My purposes in this paper are four-fold: (1) offer a comprehensive listing of 15 potential causal pathways between neighbourhood context and individual behavioural and health outcomes, which synthesizes both sociological and epidemiological perspectives; (2) provide a new conceptualization of dimensions of neighbourhood effect mechanisms that uses a pharmacological analogy to clarify the empirical challenges of this field of enquiry; (3) provide an updated, international review of empirical studies related to neighbourhood effect mechanisms; and (4) draw provisional conclusions about the dominant neighbourhood effect mechanisms operating and implications from this review for scholarship and public policy. The paper is organized as follows. I begin with an overview of the numerous possible neighbourhood effect mechanisms that have been hypothesized, and group them into four categories. Next I will examine a variety of issues that render the identification of neighbourhood causal mechanisms particularly challenging for social scientists, and the two methodological approaches that have been adopted thus far. These issues are brought into clear relief by use of a pharmacological metaphor: dosage-response . I will then synthesize the international evidence related to the four categories of mechanisms, each in its own subsection, in an effort to assess the state of empirical scholarship and offer some provisional conclusions. Finally, I close the paper by drawing implications for future scholarship and public policy.