Home and workplace neighborhood socioeconomic status and behavior-related health: a within-individual analysis

Abstract

Background: Individuals’ health-related behaviors, important determinants of cardiovascular health, might be affected by social characteristics of residential and workplace neighborhoods. Although the influence of individual and home neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) on behavior-related health has been widely studied, majority of the studies have neglected the possible impact of workplace SES. Objective: To investigate associations between home and work neighborhood SES and behavior-related health in employed individuals. Methods: Participants were from the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health with response to minimum of two surveys between 2012 and 2018. We had 13163 individuals with complete data on at least one exposure and covariates with total of 36925 observations. Neighborhood SES was determined as an index using mean income, education attainment, and unemployment rate within a 500 m buffer around home and workplace address. We used fixed effects method with conditional logistic regression to investigate longitudinal within-individual associations for home, workplace, and time weighted home and work neighborhood SES with self-reported obesity, physical activity, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, sedentary lifestyle, and sleep problems. Age, marital status, occupational position, presence of children, chronic disease, depressive symptoms, and work strain were covariates.Results: Workers were more likely to consume alcohol excessively when their workplace was located in the highest SES area compared to time when their workplace was located in the lowest SES area (adjusted OR 1.98; 95% CI,1.12-3.49). Contrarily, higher SES of the home neighborhood was non-significantly associated with low alcohol consumption. Furthermore, there was an indication of an increased risk of obesity when individuals had their workplace in the highest compared to the lowest neighborhood SES (adjusted OR 1.71;1.02-2.87). No associations were observed for other outcomes.Conclusion: These within-individual comparisons suggest that workplace neighborhood SES may have a role in health-related behaviors, particularly alcohol consumption.