Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-2020

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Geography

Major Professor

Madhuri Sharma

Committee Members

Hyun Kim, Nicholas Nagle, Haileab Hilafu, Laurie L. Meschke

Abstract

Mental health matters because it affects all aspects of our lives. There is a growing body of literature about neighborhood effects on mental health. These studies argue that individuals living in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely to suffer from mental illnesses due to the higher prevalence of chronic stressors and their inability to cope with such problems. A neighborhood, however, is much more than just the sum of its socioeconomic characteristics, and I argue that there are many other important contextual factors that need to be considered to better understand the impact of neighborhood environment on mental health. Hence, the first chapter of this dissertation focuses on identifying other theoretically justifiable neighborhood contextual factors through a review of the literature to more comprehensively assess neighborhood-level mental health vulnerabilities. This chapter also investigates the relationships among different mental health vulnerability indicators in light of existing theories by employing a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm. In the second chapter, the spatial distribution patterns of neighborhood mental health vulnerabilities are examined in the context of racial/ethnic residential segregation. These relationships are also systematically examined through multinomial logistic regression analysis. The third chapter explores neighborhood textual review data to identify more of neighborhood contextual factors that are perceived as important by residents. For this purpose, an exploratory Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method is employed. The findings from this study revealed new patterns and relationships whose importance has been largely overlooked in previous mental health studies. This study also suggests that there exists a close relationship between neighborhood mental health vulnerabilities and racial/ethnic minority concentrations, but this relationship turns out to be much more complicated than our current theoretical understanding. The exploration of residents’ perception data has identified 19 topics. When these are examined through the existing theoretical frameworks, 6 of them turn out to be new topics, which include: gentrification, diversity, natural disasters, green space, transportation, and walkability. The new knowledge obtained from this study offers valuable insights for the enhancement of our current theoretical understanding of the neighborhood effects on mental health and hence contributes to future research on similar topics.

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