LOGISTIC REGRESSION TO DESCRIBE HOW THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL CONNECTION AND SELF-RATED HEALTH VARIES BY GENDER

Social Scientists and health researchers have allocated a great deal of time trying to understand the social correlates of health outcomes, some in the question of the association between social relationships and such outcomes. This paper builds on this work by exploring the association between how connected one feels to her or his neighborhood and the chance that one reported that she or he was in poor health. Using logistic regression on a data set of 1,899 females and 1,521 males from the United States we found that, for both males and females, those who reported that their neighbors give them a sense of community were less likely to report that they were in poor health, but this association was stronger for females than for males.