On pathways and agreement: Objective and perceived accounts of neighbourhood attributes and their associations with mental health during pregnancy

There is growing interest in understanding the links between neighbourhood environmental attributes (i.e. greenness, walkability and air pollution) and human health. Recent research has analysed the mediating role of a diverse set of potential factors and studied the agreement between objective and perceived modalities of those attributes. In this study, we explored the connections between objective neighbourhood attributes, their perceived accounts and mental health during pregnancy, using a measure of social cohesion as potential mediator with data from two samples of pregnant women recruited during the 12th week of pregnancy in two Spanish cities (Donostialdea, n = 440; Barcelona n = 364). Besides, we ran analyses on the agreement between objective and perceived measures. We fitted four separate Structural Equation Models and detected associations between objective neighbourhood attributes and mental health occurred only through their perceived coun-terparts and the strengthening of social cohesion. We also found poor to fair agreement between greenness measures in both cities, walkability measures only in Donostialdea, and were unable to detect any meaningful agreement between air pollution variables. Using rescaled versions of neighbourhood attribute variables and in some instances, we saw that the higher the objective value of a given attribute, the larger the differences between objective and perceived accounts of such attributes.

Automated summary

There is increasing interest in understanding the relationship between neighbourhood environment attributes and human health. This study examined the connections between objective neighbourhood attributes, their perceived accounts, and mental health during pregnancy, with social cohesion as a potential mediator. The results showed that the associations between objective attributes and mental health occurred only through their perceived counterparts and the strengthening of social cohesion. There was also poor to fair agreement between greenness measures and no meaningful agreement between air pollution variables.