Places, People, and Health Diez Roux Invited Commentary: Places, People, and Health

health has examined how characteristics of the places where people live are related to a variety of health outcomes, including health-related behaviors (1–4), prevalence and incidence of disease (5–7), and mortality (3, 8–13). The paper by Balfour and Kaplan (14) in this issue of the Journal examines how neighborhood characteristics are related to functional loss in the elderly. The fact that health varies across geographic locations is well-established (15). The assumed explanation for these geographic differences (par-ticularly in the modern era of epidemiology, with its empha-sis on individual-level risk factors) has usually been that areas differ because of the characteristics of the people who live in them. In recent years, however, there has been renewed interest among social scientists in the ways in which neighborhood contexts may affect individual-leve