Unemployment also varies substantially from one residential area to another. For instance, among the 6,100 “block groups” (neighborhoods consisting of approximately 500 households and 0.33 square miles of land, on average) that make up the St. Louis metropolitan area, the unemployment rate in the year 2000 ranged from 0 percent in one neighborhood to 100 percent in another. © Catherine K arnow/...

Little is known about neighborhood attributes that may influence opportunities for healthy eating and physical activity in relation to breast cancer mortality. We used data from the California Breast Cancer Survivorship Consortium and the California Neighborhoods Data System (CNDS) to examine the neighborhood environment, body mass index, and mortality after breast cancer. We studied 8,995 Afri...

Neighborhood walkability can influence physical activity. We evaluated the validity of Walk Score(®) for assessing neighborhood walkability based on GIS (objective) indicators of neighborhood walkability with addresses from four US metropolitan areas with several street network buffer distances (i.e., 400-, 800-, and 1,600-meters). Address data come from the YMCA-Harvard After School Food and F...

PURPOSE Explore the importance of residential mobility and use of services outside neighborhoods when interventions targeting low-income families are planned and implemented. DESIGN Analysis of cross-sectional telephone household survey data on childhood mobility and school enrollment in four large distressed cities. SETTING Baltimore, Maryland; Detroit, Michigan; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...

OBJECTIVE : Little is known about the influence of the built environment, and in particular neighborhood resources, on health. We hypothesized that neighborhood resources for physical activity and healthy foods are associated with insulin resistance. METHODS : Person-level data (n = 2026) came from 3 sites of The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, a study of adults aged 45-84 years. Area-...

BACKGROUND Few studies have investigated both the self-perceived and measured environment with objectively determined physical activity in older adults. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to examine measured and perceived environmental associations with physical activity of older adults residing across different neighborhood types. METHODS One-hundred and forty-eight older individuals, me...

OBJECTIVE To examine associations of neighborhood characteristics with six components of the insulin resistance syndrome (IRS) in young adults. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Cross-sectional data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study were used to examine associations of neighborhood characteristics with the IRS in 3,093 nondiabetic adults aged 28-40 years. Meas...

The "neighborhood effects" literature, as currently constructed in epidemiology, would benefit from critical attention to the following four issues: 1) use of appropriate measurement tools and methods for neighborhood environments; 2) theoretical or conceptual guidance as to the aspects of residential environments most salient to human health (both within and across health endpoints); 3) the sc...

This study draws on panel data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey ( N = 1,128) to examine whether how family friends living close-by are associated with individuals’ interneighborhood residential mobility. Additional analyses tap into why proportion of nearby kin linked their The results suggest that perceptions neighborhood patterned by or not they have family—and a lesser ext...