People's mental health is intertwined with the social environment in which they reside. This chapter explores approaches for quantifying the area-level social environment, focusing specifically on socioeconomic deprivation and social fragmentation. We discuss census data and administrative units, egocentric and ecometric approaches, neighborhood audits, social media data, and street view-based assessments. We close the chapter by discussing possible paths forward from associations between social environments and health to establishing causality, including longitudinal research designs and time-series social environmental indices.
Keywords: Area-level measures; Mental health; Social environment; Social fragmentation; Socioeconomic deprivation.
© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.