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

该研究关注的是居住密度的影响，它对心理健康的影响（广义定义），以及社会支持可以调解这种关系的方式。PI将调查（通过纵向调查技术）居住在不同拥挤程度的居民的心理健康、社会支持系统和社会退缩。该调查将在第3个月和第6个月（以相同的受访者样本）重复进行。在第一次访谈后，极端四分位数（或人口密度）的受访者将被要求参加实验室研究（在初次访谈后的6周和16周）。这些实验创造性地调查了这些人的慢性生理应激水平，他们与处于类似困境的人交往的程度，以及他们寻求和接受社会支持的能力。这一建议从社会心理和心理生理两个层面攻击了密度的影响。它有望告诉我们很多关于社会支持对人们对压力环境的反应的影响。它对理论和应用的贡献应该是巨大的。

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.