Health & Place 11 (2005) 121–129 Residential instability in socioeconomically deprived neighbourhoods, good or bad? Marjan Drukker a , Charles Kaplan a,b , Jim van Os a,c, * a Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology, South Limburg Mental Health Research and Teaching Network, EURON, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616 (PAR45), 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands b Graduate School of Social Work, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA c Division of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London, UK Accepted 10 February 2004 Abstract Previously, both positive and negative effects of residential instability on various health outcomes have been described. The present study tests these effects in a European context, using two different data-sources (1) neighbourhood level data on socioeconomic deprivation and residential instability, and (2) individual-level community survey data to assess quality of life. Multilevel regression analyses showed that socioeconomic deprivation was negatively associated with several dimensions of quality of life, in stable neighbourhoods, while no such effect was observed in average or unstable neighbourhoods. Thus, when accounting for interaction effects, residential instability appeared to protect against negative effects of neighbourhood poverty and, therefore, may be beneficial for residents’ quality of life. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Residential instability; Disadvantage; Quality of life; Interaction effects Introduction Neighbourhood socioeconomic deprivation has been shown to influence both mental health (Leventhal and Brooks Gunn, 2000; Dalgard and Tambs, 1997; Sloggett and Joshi, 1994; Stafford and Marmot, 2003) and somatic health (Kawachi et al., 1999a; Diez Roux et al., 1997, 2001; Stafford and Marmot, 2003) of individual persons, over and above individual differ- ences. Previous work has suggested that residential instability, a measure related to socioeconomic depriva- tion, is also associated with health-related outcomes (Shaw and McKay, 1969; Leventhal and Brooks Gunn, 2000; Coulton et al., 1995; Ennett et al., 1997). Residential instability measures residential turn-over, for example the relative number of neighbourhood residents who have moved in the last years or the proportion of households who have lived in their current home for less than 10 years (Ross et al., 2000; Leventhal and Brooks Gunn, 2000). Previously, higher levels of residential instability have been associated with child maltreatment (Coulton et al., 1995) life-time alcohol use in children (Ennett et al., 1997), juvenile delinquency (Shaw and McKay, 1969) and mental health in adolescents (Aneshensel and Sucoff, 1996). The neigh- bourhood social organisation theory has been proposed as accounting for the underlying mechanism. High rates of residential mobility have been associated with lower levels of social organisation in early American studies ARTICLE IN PRESS *Corresponding author. Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology, South Limburg Mental Health Research and Teaching Network, EURON, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31-43- 3875443; fax: +31-43-3875444. E-mail addresses: Marjan.Drukker@sp.unimaas.nl (M. Drukker), Ch.Kaplan@sp.unimaas.nl (C. Kaplan), j.vanos@sp.unimaas.nl (J. van Os). 1353-8292/$ - see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2004.02.002