Smoking and deprivation: are there neighbourhood effects?

Debate has centred on whether the character of places plays an independent role in shaping individual smoking behaviour. At the small-area scale, part icular attention has focused on whether measures of neighbourhood deprivati on predict an individual's smoking status independent of their own personal characteristics. This study applies multilevel modelling techniques to dat a from the British Health and Lifestyle Survey and ward (local neighbourhoo d) level deprivation scores based on four variables from the national Censu s. Results suggest that after taking account of a large range of individual characteristics, both as main effects and interactions, together with comp lex structures of between-individual variation, measures of neighbourhood d eprivation continue to have an independent effect on individual smoking sta tus. In addition, significant between-ward differences in smoking behaviour remain which cannot be explained either by population composition or ward- level deprivation. The study suggests that the character of the local neigh bourhood plays a role in shaping smoking behaviour. (C) 1998 Elsevier Scien ce Ltd. All rights reserved.