The neighborhood has been used as a sampling unit for exploring variations in health outcomes. In a variety of studies census tracts or ZIP codes have been used as proxies for neighborhoods because the boundaries are pre-defined units for which other data are readily available. However these spatial units can be arbitrary and do not account for social-cultural behaviors and identities that are ...

BACKGROUND Few neighborhood observational measures have been replicated by separate research teams in different cities. PURPOSE This study replicates the neighborhood active living potential observation measure in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. METHODS Observers (n=5) participated in a 3-day neighborhood active living potential training session. Observers rated 60 neighborhoods in Saskato...

BACKGROUND : The goal of this study was to investigate cross-sectional associations between features of neighborhoods and hypertension and to examine the sensitivity of results to various methods of estimating neighborhood conditions. METHODS : We used data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis on 2612 individuals 45-85 years of age. Hypertension was defined as systolic blood pressur...

Place-based approaches to community change have become increasingly popular strategies for addressing significant social problems. With their intentional focus on 'place,' most efforts have sought to gain greater understanding into how neighborhood contexts affect people. However, while both aggregate characteristics and social dynamics of neighborhoods have been subject to scrutiny in the lite...

The authors investigated a possible contextual effect of neighborhood on individual use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and antihypertensive medication (AHM) and the impact of neighborhood social participation on individual use of these medications. They attempted to disentangle contextual from individual influences. Multilevel logistic regression modeling was used to analyze data on 15,45...

Many scholars, policy analysts, and practitioners agree that neighborhoods are important contexts for urban youth. Yet, despite decades of research, our knowledge of why and how neighborhoods influence the day-to-day lives of youth is still emerging. Theories about neighborhood effects largely assume that neighborhoods operate to influence youth through exposure-based mechanisms. Extant theoret...

We propose a measure of shape which is appropriate for the study of a complicated geometric structure, defined using the topology of neighborhoods of the structure. One aspect of this measure gives a new notion of fractal dimension. We demonstrate the utility and computability of this measure by applying it to branched polymers, Brownian trees, and self-avoiding random walks.

We consider neighborhood search defined on combinatorial optimization problems. Suppose that N is a neighborhood for combinatorial optimization problem X. We say that N′ is LO-equivalent (locally optimal) to N if for any instance of X, the set of locally optimal solutions with respect to N and N′ are the same. The union of two LO-equivalent neighborhoods is itself LO-equivalent to the neighborh...