modeling variations and investigating associations, since it
fragments space into administrative neighborhoods and
ignores spatial associations between them.
This methodological question was motivated by an epidemiologic
investigation of spatial variations in mental disorders
in Malmo¨, Sweden, using data on all 65,830 residents
aged 40–59 years in 2001 geocoded at their exact place of
residence. Several previous studies that investigated neighborhood
variations in mental health as a general category
reported only weak variations between neighborhoods (9–
12). Such variations were usually explained by differences
in neighborhood composition (9–11), but some analyses