Neighborhood Disorder and Economic Deprivation in Relation to Adolescents’ Depressive Symptoms

Neighborhood disorder and economic deprivation have been associated with depressive symptoms. Prior studies have focused on neighborhoods where participants reside, but for adolescents, neighborhoods in which they attend school may also be salient and account for substantial portions of adolescents’ “neighborhood exposure.” Accordingly, this study investigated the contributions of neighborhood disorder and economic deprivation in adolescents’ school and residential neighborhoods to mean levels of depressive symptoms in grades 10 and 11.

We used data from Waves 1 and 2 of the NEXT Generation Health Study (n=2142, mean age=16.26, 55% female), a nationally representative panel study of 10^th-grade students established in 2010. Participants reported depressive symptoms using the Modified Depression Scale (MDS) in Wave 1 and the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information (PROMIS) pediatric depressive symptoms scale in Wave 2. Participants’ school and home addresses were geocoded at Wave 1 to obtain personal, property, and total crime indices (block group), median family income (block group), and the Gini index of income inequality (census tract). Neighborhood data were also used to create a social fragmentation index (census tract), comprising residential instability, and proportions of single mother households, renters, and foreign-born residents. All variables were standardized before fitting separate multivariable linear regression models for school and residential neighborhoods, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, family affluence, neighborhood poverty, and neighborhood racial composition.

In 10^th grade analyses, higher scores on the residential neighborhood personal crime index were associated lower MDS depressive symptom scores (B=-0.05, p=0.006). In prospective analyses, higher income inequality in school neighborhoods in 10^thgrade was associated with higher PROMIS depressive symptom scores (B=0.12, p=0.02).

These findings suggest that characteristics of the neighborhoods in which study participants resided and attended school were associated with depressive symptoms, although not in totally consistent ways. Thus, future research on neighborhoods and mental health would benefit from evaluating individuals’ relative exposure to different neighborhood contexts. That higher levels of personal, violent crime in participants’ home neighborhoods were associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms in 10^th grade was unexpected and needs to be pursued further to evaluate potential explanations. Our finding that school neighborhood income inequality was associated with higher depressive symptoms is consistent with prior evidence that the inequitable income distribution has deleterious effects on mental health.