BACKGROUND The neighborhood environment has the potential to influence children's participation in physical activity. However, children's outdoor play is controlled by parents to a great extent. This study aimed to investigate whether parents' perceptions of the neighborhood environment and the objectively measured neighborhood environment were associated with children's moderate-to-vigorous in...

A growing body of research in epidemiology and public health has examined how characteristics of the places where people live are related to a variety of health outcomes, including health-related behaviors (1–4), prevalence and incidence of disease (5–7), and mortality (3, 8–13). The paper by Balfour and Kaplan (14) in this issue of the Journal examines how neighborhood characteristics are rela...

BACKGROUND Minimal validity evidence exists for scales assessing the built environment for physical activity. The purpose of this study was to assess the test-retest reliability and invariance of a three-factor model (Neighborhood Characteristics, Safety/Crime, and Access to Physical Activity Facilities) across gender, race, geographic location, and level of physical activity. METHODS To asse...

Terrain characteristics, such as slope gradient, slope aspect, profile curvature, contour curvature computed from digital elevation model (DEM), are among the key inputs to digital soil surveys based on geographic information systems (GIS). These terrain attributes are computed over a neighborhood (spatial extent). The objective of this research was to investigate the combi ed effect of DEM res...

Efficient and flexible data structures are important to the development of computer mapping. Most current data banks are characterized by 1) structures which' are convenient at the input stage rather than at the stages of use within computer programs, 2) separate and uncoordinated files for different types of geographic feahires, and 3) a lack of information about neighboring entities. The term...

BACKGROUND Screen time activities (e.g., television, computers, video games) have been linked to several negative health outcomes among young people. In order to develop evidence-based interventions to reduce screen time, the factors that influence the behavior need to be better understood. High neighborhood disorder, which may encourage young people to stay indoors where screen time activities...

Assessing geographic variations in health events is one of the major tasks in spatial epidemiologic studies. Geographic variation in a health event can be estimated using the neighborhood-level variance that is derived from a generalized mixed linear model or a Bayesian spatial hierarchical model. Two novel heterogeneity measures, including median odds ratio and interquartile odds ratio, have b...

The aim of this study is to investigate individual and joint associations of the home environment and the neighborhood built environment with adolescent dietary patterns and body mass index (BMI) z-score. Racially/ethnically and socioeconomically diverse adolescents (n=2682; 53.2% girls; mean age14.4 years) participating in the EAT 2010 (Eating and Activity in Teens) study completed height and ...

BACKGROUND The study examines the association of neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation and metabolic syndrome with inflammation. METHODS The analysis included 19, 079 black and white participants from the REasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke Study who were age > 45 years at baseline. Logistic regression examined whether neighborhood deprivation was associated with increase...