There is a growing body of public health research documenting how characteristics of neighborhoods are associated with differences in the health status of residents. However, little is known about how the spatial resolution of neighborhood observational data or community audits affects the identification of neighborhood differences in health. We developed a systematic neighborhood observation i...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to extend the analysis of neighborhood effects on child behavioral outcomes in two ways: (1) by examining the geographic extent of the relationship between child behavior and neighborhood physical conditions independent of standard administrative boundaries such as census tracts or block groups and (2) by examining the relationship and geographic extent ...

Geographic routing is a promising routing scheme in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), is shifting toward duty-cycled WSNs in which sensors are sleep scheduled to reduce energy consumption. However, except the connected-k neighborhood (CKN) sleep scheduling algorithm and the geographic routing oriented sleep scheduling (GSS) algorithm, nearly all research work about geographic routing in duty-cyc...

OBJECTIVE Despite well-known adverse health effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy (MSP), it is still unclear if MSP varies geographically and if neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation (SED) plays an important role in MSP. This study aims to investigate small-area geographic variation in MSP and examine the association of SED with MSP. METHODS The Missouri Adolescent Female Twin Study (...

Adverse socioeconomic conditions, at both the individual and the neighborhood level, increase the risk of colorectal cancer (CRC) death, but little is known regarding whether CRC survival varies geographically and the extent to which area-level socioeconomic deprivation affects this geographic variation. Using data from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-AARP Diet and Health Study, the aut...

Neighborhood is a social and geographic concept that plays an increasingly important role in research and practice that address disparities in health and well-being of populations. However, most studies of neighborhoods, as well as community initiatives geared toward neighborhood improvement, make simplifying assumptions about boundaries, often relying on census geography to operationalize the ...

Neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation has been associated with health behaviors and outcomes. However, neighborhood socioeconomic status has been measured inconsistently across studies. It remains unclear whether appropriate socioeconomic indicators vary over geographic areas and geographic levels. The aim of this study is to compare the composite socioeconomic index to six socioeconomic indic...

Urban neighborhoods are a unique form of geography in that their boundaries rely on a social definition rather than a well-defined physical or administrative boundary. Currently, geographic gazetteers capture little more than then the centroid of a neighborhood, limiting potential applications of the data. In this paper, we present μ-shapes, an algorithm that employs fuzzy-set theory to model n...

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...

While cellular automata (CA) models have been increasingly used over the last decades to simulate a wide range of spatial phenomena, recent studies have illustrated that they are sensitive to cell size and neighborhood configuration. In this paper, a new vector-based cellular automata (VecGCA) model is described to overcome the scale sensitivity of the raster-based CA models. VecGCA represents ...