by Alan Marshall, Kimberly More and Helena Tunstall

The characteristics of the neighbourhoods we live in have the potential to impact our health, wellbeing as well as other social outcomes. Existing evidence often focusses on area deprivation with less consideration of positive aspects of community that are valued by residents. Such neighbourhood assets might include access to nature, strong feelings of belonging and trust in neighbours or a willingness to give time for broader social good within the neighbourhood. In response the Index of Community Assets team within REALITIES are working to co-develop, collate, and validate a set of neighbourhood measures on community assets. We are reviewing and exploiting new social data, informed by insights from our community hubs, on what aspects of community are important. We will also conduct a statistical evaluation of the neighbourhood data we produce to assess how well these measures perform in predicting local health, wellbeing and other social outcomes.

As the first stage in this work, we have reviewed data describing community assets and social relationships in neighbourhoods across the UK. The increasing digitisation of datasets and maps means that opportunities for quantitative neighbourhood research have expanded significantly in recent years. This overview brings together neighbourhood data describing social connection and isolation, public services, like GPs and dentists, the retail environment, including food and tobacco stores and the natural environment, like local parks. The identification of data on aspects of communities that shape health will also benefit from insights from qualitative researchers based in REALITIES projects in communities in Scotland, helping to ensure that the collated data reflects key aspects of wellbeing highlighted by these communities.

As part of the Index of Community Assets workstream, research employing some new neighbourhood datasets, analysing innovative data from local newspapers, has already been completed. We explored whether we could use local Edinburgh newspaper articles to identify whether the frequency of community events or low-level crime and antisocial behaviour differ from place to place. Our analysis suggests that the spatial patterns we observed do indeed provide insights into meaningful social dynamics within (Grivas et al. 2024). We validated our analysis through a public engagement workshop where we invited 10 members of the public who read local newspapers and were able to apply their local knowledge of the city of Edinburgh to comment on and interpret our neighbourhood statistics. We also conducted an empirical validation, exploring whether the statistics on newspaper themes explain spatial variation in health outcomes across Edinburgh neighbourhoods with some encouraging results (Abubakar et al. forthcoming). After controlling for deprivation, themes of ‘heritage’ and ‘community sports identity’ were associated with better health outcomes, whereas ‘low-level social disorder’ was associated with poorer health outcomes.

In a related piece of work, we accessed a special license version of the UK Household Longitudinal Study which provides the rich social detail to explore pathways through which neighbourhood social context impacts health. Our analysis, published in Health & Place journal (Rowley-Abel et al. 2024) found lower levels neighbourhood cohesion (community togetherness) to be associated with higher rates of poor health, independent of area deprivation. Importantly, this association was explained by individual’s experience of loneliness; higher risk of poor health in neighbourhoods with low cohesion is largely driven by greater loneliness amongst its residents. We also found that better access to green and blue space is associated with lower risks of poor health. Our results here tally with qualitative work in other parts of REALITIES that has found that loneliness is a key theme that comes up in community workshops and engagement events. Lucy Campbell, REALITIES community-embedded researcher in Easter Ross in the Highlands, and the director of Flip of the Coin, says:

“Being in the rural Highlands comes with its own set of challenges, and isolation and the ensuing loneliness are one of the main reasons that people are being referred to our organisation. We have come to realise that most of our community members are ‘incomers’, people who have moved to the area from other parts of the country. People whose roots and connections do not go as deep and so they find themselves here without a community to lean into. This often leads to depression and anxiety, which we know are the precursor conditions for multi-morbidity. By providing a creative and welcoming place and space for people to come together, we are seeing amazing improvements in people’s health and wellbeing. We are seeing that community is a cure for whatever is ailing us.”

The next step of the Index of Community Assets work stream is to evaluate the set of statistics on community assets by linking them to nationally representative survey data to see how well they perform in predicting wellbeing and subjective views of neighbourhood. We will also work with the Dundee hub of REALITIES to create a Local State of Community Assets reports that blends quantitative and qualitative perspectives on community assets within Dundee neighbourhoods. Our final aim is to share all our statistics on community assets (available across UK or Scotland neighbourhoods) via an interactive web-mapper.

References:
Abubakar, E., Grivas, A., Grover, C., Tobin, R., Llewellyn, C., Zheng, C., Alex, B., Dibben, C., Pearce, J., Marshall, A., (forthcoming) Can topic modelling of local newspaper texts enhance understanding of neighbourhood effects on health? Geographical Analysis
Grivas, A., Grover, C., Tobin, R., Llewellyn, C., Abubakar, E., Zheng, C., Dibben, C., Marshall, A., Pearce, J., Alex, B. (2025) Perceptions of Edinburgh: Capturing neighbourhood characteristics by clustering geoparsed local news. Information Processing & Management. Vol(62), Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2024.103910.
Rowley-Abel, L., Zheng, C., More, K., Abubakar, E., Dibben, C., Pearce, J., Marshall, A. (2025) Neighbourhood social cohesion, loneliness and multimorbidity: Evidence from a UK longitudinal panel study. Health & Place. Vol(91). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2025.103414.