 | The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
|
| The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
Tod Mijanovich, MPA and Beth Weitzman, PhD. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University, Center for Health and Public Service Research, 726 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003, 212-998-7467, tod.mijanovich@nyu.edu
This presentation will analyze the effects of residential area characteristics on the parent-reported health status of school-age children. Data will be drawn from the Survey of Adults and Youth (SAY), a national telephone household survey of approximately 14,000 households fielded in 2001-2. The survey is part of the evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Urban Health Initiative (UHI), a ten-year effort to improve the health and safety of youth in disadvantaged U.S. cities. This survey is particularly appropriate for examining the relationship between neighborhoods and children's health, for two reasons: 1) it contains multiple measures of neighborhood characteristics not usually contained in health-related surveys, such as measures of institutional performance, perceptions of crime and violence, collective efficacy measures, and others; and 2) the majority of sample points have been successfully geocoded to the census tract level, allowing us to combine the data with a variety of census measures of the neighborhood, such as racial and income distributions. We also depart from a number of other studies in 1) using a smaller definition of neighborhood (census tract) than many other studies that have used larger areas (such as zip code or county), 2) including characteristics from three levels of data -- individual, family, and area -- and adjusting for intra-class correlations, and 3) examining the parent-reported health status of children who are somewhat older (age 5-18) than children most other studies have examined. If our preliminary findings are confirmed, we will show that physical neighborhood deterioration, lack of neighborhood-based services, deteriorating social networks, and restricted opportunities for children's activities are associated with worse health outcomes for children.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Children and Adolescents, Survey
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.