Housing Tenure and Mental Health Across Adulthood: Evidence from the 1970 British Birth Cohort

Sustained home ownership across ages 26–46 in the 1970 British Cohort Study is linked to lower psychological distress and higher positive mental wellbeing at age 51.

• Why it matters: Housing tenure patterns in the UK have shifted, but it is unclear how ownership trajectories relate to midlife mental health while accounting for changing confounders over time.
• What they did: Using 8,016 BCS70 participants with repeated tenure measures from ages 26–46, the study defined ownership regimes and estimated contrasts for psychological distress and positive mental wellbeing at age 51 using g-estimation of a structural nested mean model.
• The result: At age 51, sustained ownership showed an ATE of -0.21 (95% CI -0.47 to -0.03) for psychological distress versus never owning and an ATE of 0.56 SD (95% CI 0.38 to 0.67) for positive mental wellbeing.

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