Abstract
At the core of housing and welfare research is a premise that stable residential environments are important to children’s health and development. The relationship between housing stability and health outcomes for children is, however, complex; stable housing situations are sometimes associated with poorer health outcomes, and some children may be more or less resilient to residential instability. The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) dataset enables us to longitudinally follow the housing and health of more than 10,000 children and their families. We employ a quantile analysis technique, a currently underutilized tool for testing associations across the distribution of an outcome, to test whether exposure to housing instability has a differential impact on children’s health dependent on their initial health status. Our findings suggest that the health outcomes of residential instability are highly dependent on children’s initial health status.
Highlights
The relationship between housing and health is well established, with a solid body of increasingly sophisticated research exploring the diversity of ways that housing affects health
The role of housing in driving children’s health outcomes is important, because children generally have a higher exposure to their housing, but because this exposure is occurring at a time when lifelong developmental and health effects are formed
Mean health summary scores were related to mobility level, with residential instability associated with lower health scores
Summary
The relationship between housing and health is well established, with a solid body of increasingly sophisticated research exploring the diversity of ways that housing (for example its quality, location, affordability, and appropriateness) affects health (across for example mental, physical, or service usage). This work is important in the formulation of policies and interventions that harness housing to improve, protect, and maximize the health of individuals and their families. Social determinants like housing [1], alongside other physical environmental features [2], are increasingly revealed as essential to the later-life health and development of children (as described in Reference [3]). Consideration of the living conditions of children is highlighted as a central feature of the World Health Organization’s position on the social determinants of health. The World Health Organization’s position on childhood as a critical period within the lifecycle sits on a strong base of neurobiological evidence, which suggests that environmental exposures during childhood are carried into adulthood [5]
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