Who Needs Perceived Control? Joint Associations of Near-Home Tree Cover and Mastery with Health

• In Event: Medical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 13. Health Inequality

Abstract

Different branches of social science have developed independent explanations and prospective solutions for health inequalities. One scholarly lineage emphasizes unequally distributed psychosocial resources like mastery, the sense of control over life outcomes. Another emphasizes resources in the built and natural environment, such as the unequal levels of tree cover across neighborhoods. Both mastery and tree cover are robustly associated with better health, but prior literature has not evaluated how these two resources jointly relate to health.

This project addresses two foundational questions about mastery and tree cover’s joint association with health: (1) Might mastery explain tree cover’s association with health? (2) Might mastery’s health benefits depend on tree cover?

I test whether mastery statistically mediates tree cover’s association with health, and whether mastery and tree cover interact in their association with health (i.e., moderation). Analyses use five waves of repeated-measures data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study (1995-2022), linked with residential tree canopy cover data for the same time frame. I use “hybrid” effects models, and adjust for time-invariant covariates (gender, race/ethnicity) and time-varying (e.g., age, marital status, neighborhood socioeconomic status) factors.

This project’s findings will indicate whether (and to what extent) tree cover most plausibly represents an unrecognized source of mastery, an unrecognized moderator of mastery’s health effects, or else a wholly independent driver of health inequalities.

Author

• Elsinore Kuo, Northwestern University