Environmental Health Inequities : Low-Income Mothers' Negotiation of Health in a Low-Income Urban Neighborhood

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between health and the urban environment as it is experienced and negotiated by low-income mothers within the context of everyday family life. The research questions were: 1) How are low-income mothers' everyday health decisions for their families influenced by their urban environments? and 2) how do low-income mothers understand and negotiate their experiences of poverty, their low-income urban neighbourhood and health?

An ecofeminist framework guided the critical analysis of gendered environmental health inequities, capturing the complexity with which gender, class, the social and physical environments interact to mediate health or health inequities. The methodology combined urban- and institutional ethnography to allow data collection and analysis consistent with an ecofeminist framework. The policy document analysis of the Day Care Act of Nova Scotia explicated patriarchal and neoliberal gender and class assumptions that have implications for mothers' health decisions. A photovoice approach invited participants to take photographs of their neighborhood. Over the course of 19 months I interviewed 11 women living in the low-income, urban neighborhood of Spryfield, a suburb of Halifax Regional Municipality, the capital of the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia.

Findings included four themes: the absence of regulated childcare, negotiating urban infrastructure, negotiating nutrition, and mothers' invisible balancing act for negotiating health. Results of this study added insights into physical and social urban environments through the lived experience of low-income mothers living in low-income urban neighborhoods. This study sheds light on how issues of childcare, housing, nutrition, and urban infrastructures in the context of poverty are fundamental to the larger issues of environmental health. This study's methodology supported the creation of experience-based evidence to inform public policy that is relevant to low-income mothers living in low-income urban neighborhoods.

The evidence generated by this study adds to the scientific and moral evidence that calls for universal childcare in Nova Scotia. Implications for further research and policy development include the use of innovative methodologies to capture the complex nature of urban governance, by mapping multiple, layered conceptual frameworks of actors and institutions that influence the public policy-making processes.