Living in ‘Birdsville’: Exploring the impact of neighbourhood stigma on health

doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2009.11.010

Health & Place

Volume 16, Issue 2, March 2010, Pages 381-388

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2009.11.010 Get rights and content

Abstract

Aims

The stigma of living in a disadvantaged area is a consistent theme in discussions with residents of neighbourhood renewal (NR) areas in Victoria, Australia. Despite this, stigma is rarely examined explicitly in studies of neighbourhood disadvantage and health. This study will address four questions: (1) How do residents of disadvantaged areas describe their experiences of neighbourhood stigma? (2) Do experiences of neighbourhood stigma vary within neighbourhoods? (3) Is neighbourhood stigma related to health? (4) Is the relationship between neighbourhood stigma and health explained by other social factors that may contribute to poorer health?

Design

Cross-sectional community interviews comparing people living in NR areas (n=4029) to people living in other parts of the same local government areas (LGAs) (n=1857). Recruitment was achieved using community interviewers in NR areas and stratified random sampling in LGAs.

Main outcome measures

A neighbourhood stigma variable, self-reported health, and satisfaction with life.

Results

About half (47.7%) of residents living in NR neighbourhoods compared to 9.4% of residents living elsewhere in the same LGAs felt that their neighbourhoods did not have a good reputation in surrounding areas. In NR areas, reported neighbourhood stigma was higher among people born in a non-English speaking country, receiving benefits or pensions, educated above year 10, or who reported having a disability. Reported neighbourhood stigma decreased with age. Stigma was associated with being in fair/poor health status (OR=1.33, 1.06–1.89) and life satisfaction (OR=0.66, 0.55–0.8).

Conclusions

Neighbourhood stigma may be a useful addition to the portfolio of variables that describe ‘place’ and its relationship with health.

Section snippets

The stigmatising of poor neighbourhoods

Poor neighbourhoods are susceptible to acquiring notorious reputations for being disordered and dangerous places, and this colours generalised impressions of the people who live there. There is a growing body of evidence from the fields of urban studies and sociology that shows that tendencies to stigmatise poor neighbourhoods and their residents, have detrimental impacts on the everyday life and compounds the general lack of opportunities that are associated with household- and area-level

Site selection

The participating NR sites are involved in an intervention to improve socio-economic and health outcomes in disadvantaged communities. Many of the neighbourhoods are typical of ‘old-economy extremely disadvantaged’ neighbourhoods and a total of 22 NR projects have now been established. The sites were selected because they have higher concentrations of public housing compared to the rest of Victoria and, matched against the Victorian average, they showed high relative disadvantage on a range of

Residents’ perceptions of neighbourhood stigma

The open-ended responses referring to problems with the negative reputation of the neighbourhood are useful for gaining insight into the ways in which residents perceived to experience place-based stigma. The responses that are presented here were selected because they illustrate the range of ways in which issues of neighbourhood stigma were conceptualised by respondents. The following responses show the general ways in which responses nominated issues of place-based stigma as being one of the

Discussion

Research into the relationship between health and place runs the risk of conceptualising places merely as containers of people and things. The findings discussed in this paper show how experiences of ‘place’ are configured through material and social circumstances and that the interaction of these sets of conditions can independently affect health. Neighbourhood stigma has been identified as an important secondary impact of concentrated neighbourhood disadvantage that further impacts on

Conclusion

Neighbourhood stigma appeared to contribute to adverse exposures experienced by the most disadvantaged people in poor neighbourhoods. The results suggest that neighbourhood stigma was associated with both poorer health and lower life satisfaction. This effect remained, and in fact increased, when other social aspects of neighbourhoods were accounted for. Neighbourhood stigma appears to be implicated in complex processes that contribute to social, economic and health disadvantages that are

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View full text

Living in ‘Birdsville’: Exploring the impact of neighbourhood stigma on health

Abstract

Aims

Design

Main outcome measures

Results

Conclusions

Section snippets

The stigmatising of poor neighbourhoods

Site selection

Residents’ perceptions of neighbourhood stigma

Discussion

Conclusion

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Social Science & Medicine

Social Science & Medicine

Australian New Zealand Journal Public Health

Health and Place

Perception of racism explains the difference between Blacks’ and Whites’ level of healthcare trust

Ethnicity and Disease

Health psychology: why some people get sick and some stay well?

Annual Review of Health Psychology

A biobehavioural model of cancer stress and disease course

American Psychologist

Code of the Street

From stigma to demolition: Australian debates about housing and social exclusion

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

Public Housing in Australia: Stigma, Home and Opportunity

Disentangling area effects: evidence from deprived and non-deprived neighbourhoods

Urban Studies

‘Opportunities and despair, It's all in there’: practitioner experiences and explanations of area effects and life chances

Sociology

Health psychology: mapping biobehavioural contributions to health and illness

Annual Review of Pyschology

Fault Lines Exposed. Advantage and Disadvantage Across Australia's Settlement System

Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination

American Economic Review

Post-war large housing estates in Norway—well-kept residential areas still stigmatised?

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

Understanding post-traumatic stress disorder

Journal of Clinical Psychaitry

Conceptualising ‘social capital’ for health promotion in small local communities: a micro-qualitative study

Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology

Living inferiority

British Medical Bulletin

Psychological stress and susceptibility to the common cold

New England Journal of Medicine

Stress and infectious disease in humans

Psychological Bulletin

A nation still dividing: the British census and social polarisation 1971–2001

Environment and Planning A

Poverty of Place. Poverty and Place: Policies for Tomorrow

Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

A comparison of chronic pain patients and controls on traumatic events in childhood

Disability and Rehabilitation