Abstract
In seeking to understand the relationship between housing and health, research attention is often focussed on separate components of people’s whole housing ‘bundles’. We propose in this paper that such conceptual and methodological abstraction of elements of the housing and health relationship limits our ability to understand the scale of the accumulated effect of housing on health and thereby contributes to the under-recognition of adequate housing as a social policy tool and powerful health intervention. In this paper, we propose and describe an index to capture the means by which housing bundles influence health. We conceptualise the index as reflecting accumulated housing “insults to health”—an Index of Housing Insults (IHI). We apply the index to a sample of 1000 low-income households in Australia. The analysis shows a graded association between housing insults and health on all outcome measures. Further, after controlling for possible confounders, the IHI is shown to provide additional predictive power to the explanation of levels of mental health, general health and clinical depression beyond more traditional proxy measures. Overall, this paper reinforces the need to look not just at separate housing components but to embrace a broader understanding of the relationship between housing and health.
Highlights
Since the foundation work of John Snow [1] almost 200 years ago, our conceptualisation of the means by which housing contributes to the health and wellbeing of people has evolved through the work of geographers, epidemiologists, economists and specialist housing researchers
This paper has proposed an encompassing means to examine and document the housing and health relationship, one that acknowledges the combined influence of housing bundles
In order to capture the combined influence of multiple housing problems on health, we constructed and examined an Index of Housing Insults among a lower-income population in Australia
Summary
Since the foundation work of John Snow [1] almost 200 years ago, our conceptualisation of the means by which housing contributes to the health and wellbeing of people has evolved through the work of geographers, epidemiologists, economists and specialist housing researchers. Snow’s work changed the way disease transmission was understood by looking beyond the individual to the place in which they lived. Two centuries of subsequent research has developed the basic understanding of a link between dwelling and disease transmission towards a more fine-grained conceptualization of the role of housing as a determinant of health and wellbeing [2,3]. Lives—across and beyond our wealth, health, wellbeing, employment and educational opportunities. This collection of components has been usefully conceptualised (for example [4,5,6]) as a “housing bundle”, one that captures the housing choices, history, available resources and limitations that individuals command. While acknowledging that individual housing components work together as housing bundles, work in the field has mostly focussed on the effects of singular dimensions of housing, such
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
