Assessing The Influence Of The Neighborhood Environment On Evaluative And Emotional Subjective Well-Being

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. March 2020. Major: Urban and Regional Planning. Advisor: Yingling Fan. 1 computer file (PDF); xiii, 311 pages.Comprehending and promoting well-being has been regarded as a key goal in academic research and policy making given its significant role in creating and maintain healthy, productive societies. As urban planners focus on designing and maintaining living environments, they have the potential to enhance the well-being of residents and provide opportunities for all to flourish. It is therefore critical for planners to understand how the built environment influences well-being. Despite the theoretical importance in linking planning to subjective well-being (SWB), the attention to SWB in planning is relatively recent. There remain significant gaps in the planning literature including inadequate research on the emotional aspects of SWB and omission of key SWB determinants in analysis due to a lack of interdisciplinary perspectives. In this dissertation, we hope to fill these gaps in the planning literature, add to the understanding of how attributes of the neighborhood influence the evaluative and emotional dimensions of SWB, and explore analysis methods best suited to study the neighborhood-SWB relationship. To this end, two detailed literature reviews were conducted to identify an extensive list of SWB determinants to include in the analysis. Original data were collected via a survey conducted in the Minneapolis-St Paul Twin Cities area from October 17, 2016 to October 25, 2017. The data collection effort was part of the Sustainable Healthy Cities project funded by the National Science Foundation. We find that evaluative and emotional SWB have varied determinants, both at the personal and neighborhood level. We also find evidence to support that relationships between neighborhood attributes and evaluative and emotional SWB can be asymmetric. Specifically, there is a typology of neighborhood attributes in terms of how they impact SWB when these attributes perform poorly/absent, at all levels of performance, and only at a high performance. The typology is also sensitive to modeling techniques as well as data coding schemes. Across all models used the nature of the relationships between neighborhood attributes and SWB is found to vary based on the SWB measure used. Given the sensitivity of findings to SWB measures used, analysis modeling and coding, directions for future research are discussed