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Category Archives: Methods
Measuring Neighborhood Walkability across Communities in the U.S. Over the Past Three Decades
The evidence on links between neighborhood walkability and physical activity and body mass index remains limited because there have been few longitudinal studies with repeated measures of neighborhood walkability and health behavior and outcomes. While large cohort studies with long-term … Continue reading
How and where patterns of activity among older adults change over time
At BEH, we’re interested in how your residential neighborhood affects how physically active you are. But we’ve come to understand that being active as not just one thing and not merely a matter of expending calories. That is, walking is … Continue reading
Posted in Adults, Methods, Physical Activity, Physical Disorder
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Commandments for Variable Naming and Data Management
As we launched another multifaceted geographic data linkage study our multi-institution team, that includes researchers at Drexel University, Columbia University and the University of Washington, has developed a set of commandments to streamline and harmonize our data management, variable naming … Continue reading
Posted in Methods, Tools
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Steve Mooney receives Poster Award at Epidemiology Congress of the Americas 2016
Steve Mooney, a recently minted PhD who did his doctoral work with the BEH group, won a best poster presentation award at the 2016 Epidemiology Congress of the Americas for his work on the Neighborhood Environment-Wide Association Study design. Dr. … Continue reading
Can Big Data get us Better Estimates of Neighborhood Disorder?
At the Built Environment and Health group, we try hard to measure neighborhood characteristics accurately. We systematically audit Street View imagery, we use LiDAR scans to assess tree canopy, and we use business registration records to profile neighborhood retail. A … Continue reading
Posted in Methods, Physical Disorder, Street View
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Maintaining Human Subject’s Protections in Neighborhood Health Effects Research
We recently published a commentary in the American Journal of Public Health describing the concerns we have for protecting study subject anonymity with the use of online geographic and data tools in neighborhood health effects research. Examples of neighborhood data available … Continue reading
Posted in Methods, Tools, Uncategorized
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Strategies to Refine Annual Business Establishment Data across More than Two Decades
Analyses of place and health have been largely cross-sectional, and new challenges are faced as we wrangle longitudinal geographic data. Our group just published a manuscript detailing our work to clean and code data on all NYC metropolitan area businesses … Continue reading
Posted in Economic Development, Food Environment, Methods
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CDC Releases New Built Environment Assessment Tool
The CDC released a new direct systematic observation data collection instrument for measuring the core features and quality of the built environment related to behaviors that affect health, especially behaviors such as walking, biking, and other types of physical activity. The … Continue reading
Posted in Community Needs Assessment, Methods, Walkability
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New Research Using Google Street View to Conduct Neighborhood ‘Virtual Audits’
We recently published three papers describing our use of Google Street View to conduct ‘virtual-audits’ to collect observational data on neighborhood characteristic and conditions. A long established approach to collecting data on neighborhood conditions is to send trained observers to … Continue reading
Posted in CANVAS, Methods, Physical Disorder, Street View, Urban Design, Walkability
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Steve Mooney receives Award at Society for Epidemiologic Research Annual Meeting
Steve Mooney, a doctoral student with the BEH group, won a best poster presentation award at the Society for Epidemiologic Research annual conference for his work on the effects on causal inference of error in measuring contextual variables. Proportion of … Continue reading
Posted in Methods
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