On: Living Near Trees, Not Just Green Space, Improves Wellbeing

[tunesmith]

Or something else causes both healthy people and living near trees.

[Symmetry → tunesmith]

The obvious one being

  wealthy people   ->   wealthy community
       |                      |
       v                      v
  good health               trees

[sarchertech → Symmetry]

The article says they controlled for income.

[jdietrich → sarchertech]

That's not the same as controlling for socio-economic status. A millennial living in a city-center apartment and a boomer living in a paid-up house in the suburbs might have the same income, but they have very different life circumstances and experience very different levels of stress.

[sarchertech → jdietrich]

They also controlled for "age, sex, annual household income, economic status (eg, employed, retired, or unemployed), highest educational qualification, and couple status".

Taken together those are likely to capture socio-economic status in all but a few edge cases. With a very large study size, and a huge result (30% difference) it's unlikely that it can be explained by socioeconomic status.

The study discusses this by the way.

[jdietrich → sarchertech]

>Taken together those are likely to capture socio-economic status in all but a few edge cases.

Socio-economic status is notoriously difficult to control for.

https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/81-82/1/21/282643

[sarchertech → jdietrich]

If this were a small study or found a small result, then edge cases like lower income millennials with no degree who live in inherited houses in wealthy areas with trees might skew the results.

If you disagree with the studies methodology fine, but I'm satisfied that authors have done their due diligence with respect to socio-economic status.

[6gvONxR4sf7o → sarchertech]

The authors, at least in OP, use "associated with" language.

[dahfizz → Symmetry]

It's usually much cheaper to live outside of a city than inside.

[tomatotomato37 → Symmetry]

The problem with that is tree coverage drastically goes up again when you hit "broken washing machine on lawn" levels of poverty due to just the general amount of old growth in rural poor areas

[arnonejoe → Symmetry]

This is true. Leafy neighborhoods also tend to be wealthy enclaves.