Theory behind neighbourhood effects suggests that people’s spatial context potentially affects individual outcomes across multiple scales and geographies. We argue that neighbourhood effects research ...needs to break away from the ‘tyranny’ of neighbourhood and consider alternative ways to measure the wider sociospatial context of people, placing individuals at the centre of the approach. We review theoretical and empirical approaches to place and space from diverse disciplines, and explore the geographical scopes of neighbourhood effects mechanisms. Ultimately, we suggest how microgeographic data can be used to operationalise sociospatial context, where data pragmatism should be supplanted by a theory-driven data exploration.
There is no theoretical reason to assume that neighborhood effects operate at a constant single spatial scale across multiple urban settings or over different periods of time. Despite this, many ...studies use large, single-scale, predefined spatial units as proxies for neighborhoods. Recently, the use of bespoke neighborhoods has challenged the predominant approach to neighborhood as a single static unit. This article argues that we need to move away from neighborhood effects and study multiscale context effects. The article systematically examines how estimates of spatial contextual effects vary when altering the spatial scale of context, how this translates across urban space, and what the consequences are when using an inappropriate scale, in the absence of theory. Using individual-level geocoded data from The Netherlands, we created 101 bespoke areas around each individual. We ran 101 models of personal income to examine the effect of living in a low-income spatial context, focusing on four distinct regions. We found that contextual effects vary over both scales and urban settings, with the largest effects not necessarily present at the smallest spatial scale. Ultimately, the magnitude of contextual effects is determined by various spatial processes, along with the variability in urban structure. Therefore, using an inappropriate spatial scale can considerably bias (upward or downward) spatial context effects.
Appreciating spatial scale is crucial for our understanding of the sociospatial context. Multiscale measures of population have been developed in the segregation and neighborhood effects literatures, ...which have acknowledged the role of a variety of spatial contexts for individual outcomes and intergroup contacts. Although existing studies dealing with sociospatial inequalities increasingly explore the effects of spatial scale, there has been little systematic evidence on how exposure to sociospatial contexts changes across urban space, both within and between cities. This article presents a multiscale approach to measuring potential exposure to others. Using individual-level register data for the full population of The Netherlands and an exceptionally detailed multiscalar framework of bespoke neighborhoods at 101 spatial scales, we measured the share of non-Western ethnic minorities for three Dutch cities with different urban forms. We created individual and cumulative distance profiles of ethnic exposure, mapped ethnic exposure surfaces, and applied entropy as a measure of scalar variation to compare potential exposure to others in different locations both within and between cities. The multiscale approach can be implemented for examining a variety of social processes, notably segregation and neighborhood effects.
Attitudes towards conventional and complementary medicine among future healthcare professionals can impact their future pharmacotherapy practice. This study aimed to determine the prevalence and ...predisposing factors related to self-medication among medical and pharmacy students.
This cross-sectional questionnaire-based study was performed at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, on first- and final-year students of medicine and pharmacy. The multivariate Poisson regression model with robust variance was used to identify the main predictors of self-medication.
The overall self-medication prevalence in the past year was 81.3%. Independent risk factors for self-medication identified in the regression analysis were the final study year, housing condition, i.e., living in a leased apartment or in a student dormitory in comparison to living with parents, and cigarette consumption. The conventional drugs were the most frequently used, mostly for the symptoms of cold and pain. Final-year students had more confidence in conventional medicines than in herbal drugs and were more aware of the risks of their concomitant use.
Self-medication is highly prevalent among students of medical sciences, especially among final-year students. Increased medical knowledge led to the higher awareness of the drug interaction risks.
•Revisit the commuting paradox from the household perspective.•Employ a longitudinal design to analyse the gendered commuting-wellbeing causality.•Both couples reported worse life satisfaction with ...the increase of commuting time.•Husbands’ life satisfaction was influenced by wives’ commuting time.•Wives’ commuting utility was more related to the household structure.
Research on the experienced utility of commuting time is dominated by an individualistic view of choice concerning the trade-offs between long commutes and job- or housing-related benefits. The widely discussed phenomenon of the commuting paradox shows that individuals systematically report worse subjective wellbeing as commuting time increases over time, indicating the incomplete trade-offs and net disutility for long commutes at the individual level. This paper takes a household perspective and conducts one of the first longitudinal studies on the gendered relationship between commuting time and subjective wellbeing in China. Drawing upon the China Health and Nutrition Survey between 2006 and 2015, we used seemingly unrelated regression models and fixed-effect models not only to compare the within-individual effect but also to investigate the spill-over effect of commuting time on life satisfaction between matched samples of husbands and wives. We additionally examined the role of preschool-aged children and co-residence with their grandparents in the gendered commuting-wellbeing relationship. The results supported the individual-level commuting paradox, considering that both partners had lower levels of life satisfaction with the increase of their own commuting time. Interestingly, husbands’ life satisfaction was more negatively affected by wives’ commuting time than vice versa, while wives’ commuting utility was more related to the great time pressure from childcare and the social support from extended family members. Our research findings have implications for urban planning and governance policies which aim at mitigating job-housing mismatch, delivering accessible childcare services and transforming gendered social norms.
The Ljuboviđa watershed in Western Serbia with an area of 158 km
2
is frequently affected by torrential floods, which have devastating effects. The soil characteristics, land use patterns and rugged ...topography ensure the rapid generation of surface runoff during extreme rainfall events. The main focus of this work is to reconstruct the extreme torrential flood event of Ljuboviđa on 22 June 2020, by applying three flood estimation methods suitable for ungauged watersheds—the hydraulic method of flood traces, the rational method and the combined method of Soil Conservation Service and synthetic unit hydrograph theory (SCS-SUH). In all three methods, there are the most sensitive and critical parameters, so the derivation of their values was carefully carried out. These parameters are the Manning roughness coefficient,
n
in the method of flood traces, the runoff coefficient,
C
in the rational method and the curve number, CN in the SCS-SUH method. Therefore, in the case of a watershed with no hydrological record, we propose the employment of multiple methods to minimize the uncertainties in the analysis of torrential floods. The approach with three implemented methods in this work allowed to compare the obtained results, i.e. estimated peak discharges: (a)
Q
maxFT
= 176.8 m
3
s
−1
by applying the hydraulic method of flood traces; (b)
Q
maxRM
= 152.7 m
3
s
−1
by applying the rational method; and (c)
Q
maxSCS
= 186.7 m
3
s
−1
by applying the SCS-SUH method. Taking into account the variability of the results, the mean peak discharge of the June 2020 Ljuboviđa flood of 172.07 m
3
s
−1
is adopted, so the specific maximal discharge is 1.09 m
3
s
−1
km
−2
. According to the SCS-SUH method, we concluded that the flood event of Ljuboviđa on 22 June 2020, was a flood with a 100-year return period. The main results and findings could serve as a solid basis for designing future studies on flood risk management in response to the growing hazards of torrential floods.
Contextual poverty refers to high proportions of people with a low income in a certain (residential) space, and it can affect individual socioeconomic outcomes as well as decisions to move into or ...out of the neighbourhood. Contextual poverty is a multiscale phenomenon: Poverty levels at the regional scale reflect regional economic development, while meso-scale concentrations of poverty within cities are related to city-specific social, economic and housing characteristics. Within cities, poverty can also concentrate at micro spatial scales, which are often neglected, largely due to a lack of data. Exposure to poverty at lower spatial scales, such as housing blocks and streets, is important because it can influence individuals through social mechanisms such as role models or social networks. This paper is based on the premise that sociospatial context is necessarily multiscalar, and therefore contextual poverty is a multiscale problem which can be better understood through the inequality within and between places at different spatial scales. The question is how to compare different spatial contexts if we know that they include various spatial scales. Our measure of contextual poverty embraces 101 spatial scales and compares different locations within and between municipalities in the Netherlands. We found that the national inequality primarily came from the concentrations of poverty in areas of a few kilometres, located in cities, which have different spatial patterns of contextual poverty, such as multicentre, core-periphery and east–west. In addition to the inequality between municipalities, there are considerable within-municipality inequalities, particularly among micro-areas of a few hundred metres.
Residential self-selection studies argue that pre-existing travel-related attitude overshadows the role of changes in residential built environment in (re)shaping travel behaviours. Our study ...contributes to this self-selection argument by including family- and job-related life events as another self-selection source, and accounting for the reverse causality from built environment to travel attitude as opposed to the attitude-induced self-selection. Using a two-wave sample of 1,038 Dutch residents before and after the relocation, we developed structural equation models to investigate longitudinal relationships between changes in residential built environment and job-housing distances, the occurrence of life events, and changes in commuting mode choices and preferences pre-post relocation. Results supported residential self-selection arising from pre-existing preferences for car and public transport commuting, while residents lowered the active commuting preference after moving to a more suburban neighbourhood. Life events concurrent with residential relocation, such as childbirth and job changes, also underlay greater demand for car use.
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