The connection between community stress and problems and community residents’ psychopathology is an understudied area, and a limited number of studies have reported inconsistent findings. This research aimed to estimate the effect of perceived social factors in the community environment on the residents’ self-reported psychopathology. The study sample consisted of 2034 men and women from 16 selected rural counties in three provinces of China. The social factors in the village community were measured by the World Health Organization Multisite Intervention Study on Suicidal Behaviors (WHO SUPRE-MISS) scale of Community Stress and Problems. The sychological and mental health of the individuals was assessed by (1) suicidal thoughts, plans and attempts (National Comorbidity Survey Replication or NCS-R), (2) pro-suicide attitudes (General Social Survey or GSS), (3) depression (Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale or CES-D) and (4) suicide ideation (Scale for Suicide Ideation or SSI). Multiple regressions were performed separately for each of the four psychopathologic traits with the scale of Community Stress and Problems as the major predicting variable and age, gender, education years, marital status, family annual income, family status in village and religion as the confounding correlates. It is found that community stress and problems generally increase rural Chinese residents’ psychopathologies, especially issues in health care, housing and transportation, which play more important roles than others.
Structural sociologists and social psychologists postulate that the social structure, external social facts and the environment play an important role in a person’s behaviour and psychological functioning. For example, Durkheim believes that suicide, although a personal incident, is a function of the social environment (Durkheim, 1951). From a social psychologist’s point of view, it is a fundamental attribution error if someone explains a personal event with a focus on the person’s internal traits instead of the external social facts (Ross and Nisbett, 1991). In addition, not only social facts but also subjective meaning that people give to the social facts should be considered when discussing social action. Weber spoke of social action insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behaviour (Weber 1978). Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and which is subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). For example, depressed individuals reported significantly more stressful events and experienced more severe life strains than normal controls (Billings et al., 1983).
Community has been studied by previous researchers as a physical, social and cultural environment to relate to people’s physical and psychological well-being. However, a limited number of studies have been reported with conflicting findings. Some studies, including cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, found that there were negative effects between community stress and problems and the community residents’ psychopathology (Wilson et al., 2004, Henderson et al., 2005 and Dalgard and Tambs, 1997). However, others found that there were no independent effects of neighbourhood community factors on residents’ psychopathology (Schootman et al., 2007 and Thomas et al., 2007).
Inconsistent findings might be resulted from methodological flaws. Ecological fallacy, some false interpretation of aggregate-level data in individual-level terms, is likely to be found in some studies as reviewed (Firebaugh, 1978). Connecting the census data on such community characteristics as race, education and income, to individual incidence of depression may yield inaccurate conclusions, as the individuals sampled for the dependent variables may not represent the community characteristics (Schootman et al., 2007 and Thomas et al., 2007). However, using a subject’s perception of neighbourhood characteristics allows the community variable to be at the same level and comparable to the subject’s personal traits (Wilson et al., 2004).
This current study aims to further test the relationship between community factors and the residents’ psychopathology, using individual measures for both independent (perception, i.e., subjective meaning of the community environment) and dependent variables (self-evaluation of psychopathologies). As mentioned earlier, social structure, external social facts and the environment play an important role in a person’s behaviour and psychological functioning; and lack of social integration, a measure of social cohesiveness and social support and so on in the surroundings, is a strong predictor of suicide and insanity (Durkheim, 1951). It is hypothesised that community stress and problems have a negative effect on individuals’ psychological well-being and mental health.
