New research using Understanding Society has shown that ethnic diversity appears to have no long-term effect on people’s subjective wellbeing – or on objective measures of their health taken from our biomarker data.
The researchers say that ethnic diversity poses challenges “as people interact with new cultures, norms, and values, or avoid such encounters”, and that there are heated academic and political debates about how societies and local communities are affected, but not enough scientific evidence on what diversity means for individuals’ wellbeing and health. They combined data from:
- Understanding Society and its predecessor, the British Household Panel Survey, covering 2004-11
- NewETHPOP – annual ethnic population estimates for English local authority districts, 2001-11
- English Indices of Multiple Deprivation (2004, 2007 and 2010)
As well as showing how people feel – the subjective wellbeing our participants report – our data has objective measures of health. In Waves 2 and 3 of Understanding Society, around 20,000 participants had a health assessment with a nurse, and over 13,000 gave a blood sample, which was used to produce biomarker data – measures of 12 objective signs of health, such as cholesterol, hormones related to stress and ageing, and signs of inflammation in the body due to injury, infection or stress. These allowed us to create an index of allostatic load – a ‘score’ from 0 to 12 for each respondent, showing whether they were at higher or lower risk of ill health.
The research, Does ethnic diversity affect well-being and allostatic load among people across neighbourhoods in England?, published in March, shows that:
- in the short term, an increase in ethnic diversity in a neighbourhood is associated with a dip in subjective wellbeing, but this dissipates over time
- short-term changes are not prolonged or profound enough to affect chronic stress (allostatic load)
- in the long term, no effects of ethnic diversity on wellbeing and health or chronic stress were found.
The work was carried out by Danying Li, Miguel Ramos and Matthew Bennett at the University of Birmingham, Douglas Massey at Princeton, and Miles Hewstone at Oxford. They say: “The findings of this study show that initial negative health outcomes associated with changing diversity ameliorate over a 10-year follow up. These results illustrate how imperative it is that political debates and policy approaches aimed at fostering peaceful coexistence in an ever more fractured world focus on the long-term benefits of diversity rather than the short-term costs.”
Read the research in Health & Place
Find out more about our collection of health-related data, including blood pressure, weight, height, waist measurement, body fat, grip strength, lung function and blood samples from 20,000 participants
Biomarkers, genetics and epigeneticsEthnicity and immigrationPolitics and social attitudes
