BMC Public Health 2007, 7:285 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/285 amenities, neighbourhood nuisances and neighbourhood disorder, may help to contribute to people's well being. However, this study also found that these aspects of the neighbourhood environment are strongly interlinked with socio-economic deprivation. As suggested before, this could mean that the aspects of neighbourhood qual- ity and disorder, and social cohesion reflect differences in neighbourhood deprivation. Therefore the underlying socio-economic context should not be ignored when interpreting the results. The results further contribute to the newly emerging evi- dence that there are important gender differences in the associations between the neighbourhood environment and health. Hitherto, only a small number of studies have examined gender differences in (contextual) neighbour- hood health effects [26-29]. The results with regard to the social environment appear to be in line with those studies, despite differences in the conceptualisation and measure- ment of the social environment. For example, where Staf- ford et al. [27] used social trust measures that were collected in an independent sample, the current study used an ecometric approach to transform individual-level variables from the same dataset into contextual variables. Unlike Stafford et al., we found no significant interaction between gender and neighbourhood deprivation – even though we also obtained the deprivation indicator from an independent external source. Despite the absence of a statistically significant interaction between neighbour- hood socio-economic status and gender, the results show that individual socio-economic status is more important for men than for women. Overall, the suggestion that men and women interact with their environment in a different way, and thus are likely to benefit from different types of interventions, may have important health policy implica- tions. This could mean that health initiatives should be more community based for women and more workplace based for men. However, further research is needed to gain a more detailed understanding of the social processes underlying these gender health effects. Conclusion Our results indicate that various aspects of the social and physical neighbourhood environment are associated with self rated health. However, these associations seem to be confounded by neighbourhood deprivation, suggesting that the neighbourhood aspects of access to amenities, neighbourhood quality, neighbourhood disorder, and social cohesion mediate or reflect differences in socio-eco- nomic status. The study further suggests that the social environment is more important for women's health, but that individual socio-economic status is more important for men's health. The suggestion that men and women benefit differently from the neighbourhood environment warrants further investigation of gender differences in neighbourhood health effects. Competing interests The author(s) declare that they have no competing inter- ests. Authors' contributions DF designed the CHSNS and secured the funding. WP and DF conceived and carried out the analysis in this paper. DF and FD provided statistical advice. All authors read, critically revised, and approved the final manuscript. Acknowledgements John Watkins, Jonathan West, Stephen Christie, Nathan Lester, Margaret Webber and Andrew Jones of the Caerphilly Study Research Team contrib- uted to the implementation of the study, acquisition of the data and prepa- ration of the dataset for analysis. 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