Research into health disparities has long recognized the importance of residential mobility as a crucial factor in determining health outcomes. However, a lack of connectivity between the health and mobility literatures has led to a stagnation of theory and application on the health side, which lacks the detail and temporal perspectives now seen as critical to understanding residential mobility decisions. Through a critical re-think of mobility processes with respect to health outcomes and an exploitation of longitudinal analytical techniques, we argue that health geographers have the potential to better understand and identify the relationship that residential mobility has with health.

Neighbourhood effects studies have demonstrated an association between area deprivation and smoking behaviour whereby people living in deprived neighbourhoods are more likely to smoke than those in non-deprived neighbourhoods. This evidence though is based largely upon data that ignores long term exposures to neighbourhood contexts and is confounded by neighbourhood selection bias. In this study, we investigate the temporal ordering of exposure to neighbourhood deprivation throughout childhood and whether associations between neighbourhood deprivation and cigarette smoking are due to compositional or contextual neighbourhood effects. Data come from a UK cohort study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). We use longitudinal measures of neighbourhood deprivation and self-reported smoking behaviour for 2744 children to examine the influence of neighbourhood deprivation on smoking status and smoking heaviness at age 17. Our results demonstrate that children who are born into and grow up in deprived neighbourhoods are up to twice as likely to be smokers at age 17 than those in non-deprived neighbourhoods. These associations are largely due to family socioeconomic position and the intergenerational transmission of smoking behaviour from parents to children; compositional rather than direct contextual ‘neighbourhood effects’. Our findings highlight the importance of considering longitudinal exposure to neighbourhood deprivation over cross sectional exposure. In conclusion, we find that it is the family rather than the neighbourhood into which a child is born that determines their smoking behaviour.

A large literature exists suggesting that residential mobility leads to increased participation in risky health behaviours such as cannabis use amongst youth. However, much of this work fails to account for the impact that underlying differences between mobile and non-mobile youth have on this relationship. In this study we utilise multilevel models with longitudinal data to simultaneously estimate between-child and within-child effects in the relationship between residential mobility and cannabis use, allowing us to determine the extent to which cannabis use in adolescence is driven by residential mobility and unobserved confounding. Data come from a UK cohort, The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Consistent with previous research we find a positive association between cumulative residential mobility and cannabis use when using multilevel extensions of conventional logistic regression models (log odds: 0.94, standard error: 0.42), indicating that children who move houses are more likely to use cannabis than those who remain residentially stable. However, decomposing this relationship into within- and between-child components reveals that the conventional model is underspecified and misleading; we find that differences in cannabis use between mobile and non-mobile children are due to underlying differences between these groups (between-child log odds: 3.56, standard error: 1.22), not by a change in status of residential mobility (within-child log odds: 1.33, standard error: 1.02). Our findings suggest that residential mobility in the teenage years does not place children at an increased risk of cannabis use throughout these years.