Objectives: We examined whether the interactions between primarily speaking English at home and community-level measures (median household income and immigrant composition) are associated with physical inactivity and obesity.
Methods: We pooled the 2005 and 2007 Los Angeles County Health Survey data to construct a multilevel data set, with community-level median household income and immigrant density as predictors at the community level. After controlling for individual-level demographic variables, we included the respondent's perceived community safety as a covariate to test the hypothesis that perceived public safety mediates the association between acculturation and health outcomes.
Results: The interaction between community median household income and primarily speaking English at home was associated with lower likelihoods of physical inactivity (odds ratio [OR] = 0.644; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.502, 0.825) and obesity (OR = 0.674; 95% CI = 0.514, 0.882). These odds remained significant after we controlled for perceived community safety.
Conclusions: Resources in higher-income areas may be beneficial only to residents fully integrated into the community. Future research could focus on understanding how linguistic isolation affects community-level social learning and access to resources and whether this differs by family-level acculturation.