The impact of living in age diverse areas on health and well-being

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There is evidence that Britain is becoming more and more generationally divided. A major part of this is that the places where we live have become increasingly 'age segregated'. This means younger people tend to live in places where there are more younger people and older people tend to live in places where there are more older people. Deep generational divisions can have implications for social cohesion and effective societal functioning. Policy makers are concerned that this could have negative health, economic, social and political costs. Indeed, a recent report by the Resolution Foundation estimated that age-segregation could cost the UK economy £6 billion per year. However, there is currently no research in Britain that has been able to directly test whether living in areas with a greater mix of ages has an impact on people. By linking information on the number of people in different age groups at the local level with information from a long running survey, our project will be the first to do this. We will create a new measure, called the 'area level index of age diversity', for all the residential areas in Great Britain (these are called Lower Super Output Areas in England and Wales and Data Zones in Scotland). Unlike existing measures which tend to focus just on younger versus older adults, this new measure will use information from people of all ages to get a better idea of the mix of age groups in an area. The first thing we intend to do with this information is to produce a series of maps of Britain to show which local areas are more or less age diverse. This information will be very useful for local government, councils, city planners and the like. Once we have done this, we will then link our new measure of age diversity to information on around 50,000 people living in Britain who have been part of a long running study (called the UK Household Longitudinal Survey). This will enable us to see whether living in areas that have people from a wide (or narrow) range of age groups impacts on people's health (e.g. whether the person has an illness or chronic condition), well-being (e.g. loneliness), civic participation (e.g. whether someone volunteers or not), and neighbourhood quality (e.g. whether people trust their neighbours). Our findings will provide a much needed evidence base on the extent of local area level age diversity in Britain and what effect (if any) this has on people's lives.