Does Your Neighborhood Get You Depressed?

Specific residential and neighborhood attributes have been associated with individuals' physical and emotional health. To assess neighborhood social processes that might mediate risk for depression and that could eventually be targets for population-level interventions, researchers measured “collective efficacy,” which incorporates perceptions of social cohesion and informal social control. (For example, a neighborhood exerting high levels of social control might reduce the occurrence of stressful events, or the perception of these, and high social cohesion might buffer the effects of such events.)

To obtain data relevant to population-wide public health interventions, the investigators correlated the average perceived collective efficacy fo…