Residential Density and Psychological Health: The Mediating Effects of Social Support

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The research is concerned with the effects of residential density, its effects on psychological health (broadly defined), and the ways in which social support can mediate this relationship. The PI will investigate (via longitudinal survey techniques) the psychological health, social support system, and social withdrawal of people in residences of varying crowdedness. The survey will be repeated (with the same sample of respondents) at 3 and 6 months. After the first interview, respondents in the extreme quartiles (or population density) will be asked to participate in laboratory research (at 6 and 16 weeks post initial interview). The experiments creatively investigate these people's chronic physiological stress level, the extent to which they affiliate with others in similar straits, and their ability to seek and receive social support. This proposal attacks the effects of density at both the social psychological and the psychophysiological levels. It promises to tell us much about the effects of social support on people's reaction to stressful environments. Its contributions to both theory and application should be enormous.