COMMUNITY FACTORS INFLUENCE LIFE EXPECTANCY: A new study from the Penn State-based Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development (NERCRD) has found that communities in America with the following three factors have shorter life expectancies: more fast food restaurants, a larger share of extraction industry-based jobs, or higher population density.

“American life expectancy recently declined for the first time in decades, and we wanted to explore the factors contributing to this decline. Because of regional variation in life expectancy, we knew community-level factors must matter,” said Elizabeth Dobis, a postdoctoral scholar at NERCRD and lead author of the study. “By analyzing place-based factors alongside personal factors, we were able to draw several conclusions about which community characteristics contribute most strongly to this variation in life expectancy.”

The community variables they examined included health care access, population growth and density, fast food restaurants, healthy food access, employment by sector, urbanization, and social capital, which measures the networks and bonds providing social cohesion among residents.

The researchers found that a county’s 1980 life expectancy value strongly predicted variations in the 2014 value, but it didn’t account for all of the variation.

The research, which was published recently in Social Science and Medicine, also revealed several community factors that are positively related to life expectancy, including a growing population, good access to physicians, and a greater level of social cohesion.

“We were surprised by the strong positive contribution of social capital to life expectancy within communities,” said NERCRD Director Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural economics and regional economics at Penn State and a co-author on the study.

“Places with residents who stick together more on a community or social level also appear to do a better job of helping people in general live longer.”

The research also revealed four “hot spots” of high life expectancy: a section of the Northeast spanning from Philadelphia to New England, southern Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas into Nebraska, an area in Colorado, and an area spanning central Idaho into the upper Rocky Mountains.

The research was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Penn State Regional Research Appropriations.