This article was originally posted on the CRESSH newsletter, Issue Fall 2018.
CRESSH investigators publish a new study on the relationship between perceptions of environmental and social stressors and self-rated health.
Jonathan Levy (CRESSH Co-Director), JPB Senior Fellow Madeleine Scammell (CEC Director), Roseann Bongiovanni (Community Partner), along with other colleagues recently published a paper titled “Self-rated health and its association with perceived environmental hazards, the social environment, and cultural stressors in an environmental justice population.” Published in BMC Public Health, the study evaluated the relationship between public perceptions of social and environmental hazards, such as air quality, noise, social cohesion, and immigration status, on self-rated health in residents of Chelsea, MA (CRESSH partner community). The authors found that negative perceptions of environmental hazards were associated with poor self-rated health but that social cohesion, i.e. feeling included or a sense of belonging in a community, was associated with better-self rated health. These results indicate that public perceptions of social and environmental hazards play an important role in determining health and that these perceptions should be considered in efforts to improve public health at the community-level. Click here for the full article.