Martin Dribe

The turn of the twentieth century was a period of rapid decline in infant- and child mortality and a time of industrialization and urbanization in Sweden. It was also a period of growing social disparities in childhood mortality. The inequality in child survival was connected to a range of factors, including access to water- and sanitation, housing conditions, infant care, and possibly nutrition. In this paper, we study the importance of socioeconomic neighborhood context for under-five mortality in an industrializing Swedish town (1882–1939). We use individual-level socioeconomic and demographic data from population registers which have been geocoded at the block level and measure neighborhood conditions by the share of whitecollar workers in the block. We use spatial survival analysis to estimate the association between cumulative social neighborhood variables and the risk of child death. Our findings indicate that the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood was important for the risk of child death even when controlling for social class and family context. The association was present for both boys and girls and got weaker over time in the period we analyzed. Social neighborhoods mattered more for infant mortality than for child mortality. In terms of causes of death, the associations were similar for airborne infectious diseases and food/waterborne diseases, while there was no association at all for other causes of death. These findings point to the importance of neighborhoods for child survival during the urban mortality transition and might reflect both cultural and material causal pathways