Living in ‘Birdsville’: Exploring the impact of neighbourhood stigma on 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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2023, SSM - Population HealthEvidence that loneliness can be reduced by a whole-of-community intervention to increase neighbourhood identification
2021, Social Science and MedicineCitation Excerpt :For example, one study found that a sense of community predicted whether public housing residents would engage collectively with neighbours to tackle neighbourhood problems (Bolland and McCallum, 2002). The adverse effects that stigma and discrimination, based on where a person lives, have on health outcomes are well known (Gonzales et al., 2017; Kelaher et al., 2010). Studies have shown that positive contact, social connectedness, and shared place-based identity between locals can overcome the adverse effects of neighbourhood diversity and disadvantage (Fong et al., 2019a; 2019b; Stevenson et al., 2019; 2020).
My neighborhood has a good reputation: Associations between spatial stigma and health
2020, Health and PlaceCitation Excerpt :Though less studied, spatial stigma has also been shown to have detrimental effects on health. Kelaher et al. (2010), for example, found that perceptions of spatial stigma among residents of socioeconomically disadvantaged Australian neighborhoods were associated with poor self-rated health. Tabuchi et al. (2012) found that perceived geographic discrimination in a disadvantaged area of Osaka, Japan was associated with depressive symptoms.