Better to grow up poor in a richer place? Social housing, neighbourhood comparisons, and English teenagers’ well‑being

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

February 18, 2024

Summary:

How does being comparatively socio-economically disadvantaged within their neighbourhood affect the lived experiences of young teenagers? We explore this question on a sample of 13 to 15-year-old teenagers living in social housing in England. We explore three major domains of young teenagers’ well-being: (a) their sense of generally leading a bad life, (b) conflictual family interactions, and (c) unhappy social interactions with their peers. We find that living in a social housing estate within a less deprived neighbourhood does not negatively affect teenagers’ general sense of leading a bad life and does not increase conflictual family interactions. But it does make them less likely to report unhappy social interactions with their peers, indicating a positive effect of social mixing at the neighbourhood level.

Published in

Journal of Happiness Studies

Volume

Volume: 25:28

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-024-00740-z

ISSN

13894978

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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