Perceived neighborhood characteristics and the health of adult Koreans

This study examines the role of the perception of neighborhood quality with respect to its influence on individual health in Korea. Employing the Quality of Korean Life Survey, 2001, the authors discover that how respondents perceive their neighborhood quality selectively affects the health of Koreans. That is, the extents to which individuals satisfy with neighborhood safety and relationships to neighbors are considerably and significantly associated with self-rated and emotional health status among Koreans, over and beyond individual-level characteristics, while no effect is found for daily activity limitation status. This study also exhibits that most individual demographic and socioeconomic risk factors are associated with health in the pattern consistent with the general findings based mostly on Western societies.