Associations between Objective and Subjective Housing Status with Individual Mental Health in Guangzhou, China.

Lijian Xie,Lin Zhang,Suhong Zhou

doi:10.3390/ijerph18030930

Abstract

Housing is an important social determinant of mental health. However, few studies simultaneously measure the objective housing status (i.e., housing tenure, living space, housing conditions, and housing stability) and subjective housing status (i.e., housing satisfaction) as well as examine their effects on people’s mental health (i.e., stress, anxiety, and depression). Thus, using a sample size of 1003 participants by two-stage random sampling survey in Guangzhou, China, this study applies multivariate ordinary least square regression models to comprehensively explore and compare the associations between objective and subjective housing status with mental health, and then analyze the moderating effects of subjective housing status on the relationships between objective housing status and mental health. The findings suggest that there are significant differences in people’s mental health based on different housing status. The subjective housing status can better explain the variances in mental health than objective housing status. Also, subjective housing status may partly mitigate the adverse impacts of objective housing disadvantages on some aspects of an individual’s mental health. Therefore, housing improvement policies and public health initiatives should be designed based on a comprehensive account of objective and subjective housing characteristics as well as their influences on specific aspects of mental health.

Highlights

Considering the public health consequences of housing disadvantages that emerge from rapid urbanization in China as well as the gaps identified in existing literature, the present study proposes a conceptual framework (Figure 1) and aims to address the following questions: Figure 1
People who had a different status of housing tenure and living space were more likely to have significantly different mental health, that is, in aspects of stress, anxiety, and depression
This study aims at advancing the literature on housing status and different aspects of mental health by expanding measurement dimensions of housing status and exploring the adverse health effects of housing disadvantages for adults in urban China

Summary

Introduction

China’s urbanization over the last decades has been unprecedented in human history. China’s urbanization rate has from 17.92% in 1978 to 60.6% in 2019. This unprecedented urbanization wave has created a miracle of economic growth in recent decades, but it has brought a series of challenges and problems, especially in China’s megacities. Housing is one of the key problems with rapid urbanization. With the deepening of China’s urbanization, housing problems are becoming more serious and complicated, such as high housing prices, overcrowded housing, residential segregation, job-housing imbalance, and housing inequality [2]. In terms of the housing price problem that urban residents are generally more concerned about, a study of housing prices in major Chinese cities has found that for every

Results

Discussion

Conclusion