The ‘constant size neighbourhood trap’ in accessibility and health studies

Abstract

International audienceIn literature on neighbourhood effects and on resources accessibility, number of neighbourhood resources to which residents may have access are often estimated from spatial units whose constant size fails to account for unique ways residents experience their neighbourhoods. To investigate this "constant size neighbourhood trap", we compared numbers of health-care resources included in Constant Size Buffers (CSBs) and in Perceived Neighbourhood Polygons (PNPs) from cognitive neighbourhood data collected among 653 residents of the Paris metropolitan area,. We observed that residents of deprived and peripheral areas had smaller PNPs than their counterparts. Studying residents assessments of the quantity of neighbourhood practitioners, we then assessed the validity of using PNPs rather than CSBs to estimate number of neighbourhood resources. Lastly, resource inequalities across the Paris metropolitan area were found to be far wider when considering PNPs rather than CSBs. Using constant neighbourhood delineation can lead to inaccurately measure individual accessibility to neighbourhood resources and to downplay the extent of inequalities in urban resources

Cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of neighbourhood social environment and smoking behaviour: the multiethnic study of atherosclerosis

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Self‐defined residential neighbourhoods: size variations and correlates across five European urban regions

“…The second approach recognizes that predefined areas do not necessarily represent what residents perceive as their neighbourhood , but this leaves the challenge of how to define and measure self‐defined neighbourhoods . A small but growing literature has proposed methods to delineate self‐defined neighbourhood limits in health‐related studies . However, so far, most studies consist of small samples, with fewer than 70 participants .…”

Multiscale Measures of Population: Within- and between-City Variation in Exposure to the Sociospatial Context

“…The relevance of scale has been well established for the segregation literature (see, e.g., White 1983;Wong 2004;W. A. V. Clark et al 2015;Jones et al 2015), the neighborhood effects literature (Galster 2001; R. Andersson and Musterd 2010;Vall ee et al 2015), and, more broadly, research on sociospatial inequalities (Suttles 1972;Manley, Flowerdew, and Steel 2006;Prouse et al 2014), where scale is often addressed as one aspect of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP; see Openshaw and Taylor 1979;Manley 2014). Sociospatial inequalities can be more fully understood by exploring variation in geographic contexts across multiple scales, within the so-called spatial opportunity structure, rather than by confining to a single geographic context (Galster and Sharkey 2017).…”