The Role of Environmental and Public Health Factors in Children's Social Mobility

摘要

Previous studies have established that the neighborhood where a child grows up can have substantial effects on their upward income mobility. The Opportunity Atlas, constructed by researchers at Harvard University, Brown University, and the U.S. Census Bureau, is a publicly available atlas with census-tract-level estimates of children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes, such as teenage birth rates by race, gender and parental income for the entire United States. These estimates allowed the researchers to trace the roots of mobility outcomes back to the childhood neighborhoods. However, only about half of the tract-level variance in children's outcomes was explained by neighborhood disadvantage characteristics. In this study, we use data on environmental exposures (e.g., location of industrial sources), public health factors, (e.g., access to medical care), and ecosystems good and services (e.g., green space) from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's EJScreen to explore whether such environmental determinants of health and welfare have the potential to explain the remaining variance. Various factors related to census tract proximity to point pollution sources (e.g., national priority list sites, Risk Management Plan facilities, and Treatment Storage and Disposal facilities) were positively correlated with variables from The Opportunity Atlas. Pearson correlations ranged from 0.10 to 0.16, depending on gender, for the fraction of children incarcerated and a variable related parent's income level. Income rank was also correlated (0.11 to 0.15) with house units built before 1960 (an indicator of lead). These results suggest that environmental indicators may potentially contribute to adult outcomes, in conjunction with social determinants of mobility. Therefore, a more comprehensive research program is needed to understand the relationship between a child's total environment (environmental, social, and building) and long-lasting health and social impacts.