Neighborhood stressors and social support as predictors of depressive symptoms in the Chicago Community Adult Health Study

There is a growing interest in understanding the effects of specific neighborhood conditions on psychological wellbeing. We examined cross-sectional associations of neighborhood stressors (perceived violence and disorder, physical decay and disorder) and social support (residential stability, family structure, social cohesion, reciprocal exchange, social ties) with depressive symptoms in 3105 adults in Chicago. Subjects lived in 343 neighborhood clusters, areas of about two census tracts. Depressive symptoms were assessed with an 11-item version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale. Neighborhood variables were measured using rater assessments, surveys, and the US census. We used two-level gender-stratified models to estimate associations of neighborhood conditions with depressive symptoms after adjusting for individual-level covariates. Most social support variables were associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms in women but not men, while stressors were moderately associated with higher levels in all subjects. Adjusting concurrently for stressors and social support did not change results. This suggests both neighborhood stressors and social support are associated with depressive symptoms.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78331/1/MairDiezRoux2010_HealthPlace.pd

Twitter Watch: Leveraging Social Media to Monitor and Predict Collective-Efficacy of Neighborhoods

Sociologists associate the spatial variation of crime within an urban setting, with the concept of collective efficacy. The collective efficacy of a neighborhood is defined as social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good. Sociologists measure collective efficacy by conducting survey studies designed to measure individuals' perception of their community. In this work, we employ the curated data from a survey study (ground truth) and examine the effectiveness of substituting costly survey questionnaires with proxies derived from social media. We enrich a corpus of tweets mentioning a local venue with several linguistic and topological features. We then propose a pairwise learning to rank model with the goal of identifying a ranking of neighborhoods that is similar to the ranking obtained from the ground truth collective efficacy values. In our experiments, we find that our generated ranking of neighborhoods achieves 0.77 Kendall tau-x ranking agreement with the ground truth ranking. Overall, our results are up to 37% better than traditional baselines.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Constructing meaning about the delinquency of young girls in public-housing neighbourhoods

UID/SOC/04647/2013 SFRH/BPD/116119/2016Rooted in the theoretical approaches of social ecology and in childhood studies, the Ph.D. research project on which this paper is based aimed to achieve a better understanding of children’s socialization processes in multi-problematic spaces, particularly concerning their involvement in violence and delinquency. A case study based on ethnographic research and child-centred methods was carried out in six public-housing neighbourhoods in Portugal, which were chosen because they had relatively high levels of social deprivation, violence and crime. The specificity of the social group under study—children aged from 6 to 12 years old—and their living conditions, led us to extend the data collected by trying to learn, from the girls, the reasoning and the meanings they assign to their own actions in daily social practices. The intention was to study the features of girls’ socialization in the field through their own accounts of their lives and to examine their perspectives on offending behaviours. The genderized process of social learning in delinquency identified in the girls’ conversation is an important variable, as familial and social experiences tend to facilitate their entry into delinquency. The transmission of delinquent values takes place essentially within the female family circle or via female peers, rather than from the influence of male individuals.authorsversionpublishe

The joint influence of marital status, interpregnancy interval, and neighborhood on small for gestational age birth: a retrospective cohort study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Interpregnancy interval (IPI), marital status, and neighborhood are independently associated with birth outcomes. The joint contribution of these exposures has not been evaluated. We tested for effect modification between IPI and marriage, controlling for neighborhood.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We analyzed a cohort of 98,330 live births in Montréal, Canada from 1997–2001 to assess IPI and marital status in relation to small for gestational age (SGA) birth. Births were categorized as subsequent-born with <it>short </it>(<12 months), <it>intermediate </it>(12–35 months), or <it>long </it>(36+ months) IPI, or as firstborn. The data had a 2-level hierarchical structure, with births nested in 49 neighborhoods. We used multilevel logistic regression to obtain adjusted effect estimates.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Marital status modified the association between IPI and SGA birth. Being unmarried relative to married was associated with SGA birth for all IPI categories, particularly for subsequent births with <it>short </it>(odds ratio [OR] 1.60, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.31–1.95) and <it>intermediate </it>(OR 1.48, 95% CI 1.26–1.74) IPIs. Subsequent births had a lower likelihood of SGA birth than firstborns. <it>Intermediate </it>IPIs were more protective for married (OR 0.50, 95% CI 0.47–0.54) than unmarried mothers (OR 0.65, 95% CI 0.56–0.76).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Being unmarried increases the likelihood of SGA birth as the IPI shortens, and the protective effect of <it>intermediate </it>IPIs is reduced in unmarried mothers. Marital status should be considered in recommending particular IPIs as an intervention to improve birth outcomes.</p

Ambient air pollution exposure and full-term birth weight in California

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Studies have identified relationships between air pollution and birth weight, but have been inconsistent in identifying individual pollutants inversely associated with birth weight or elucidating susceptibility of the fetus by trimester of exposure. We examined effects of prenatal ambient pollution exposure on average birth weight and risk of low birth weight in full-term births.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We estimated average ambient air pollutant concentrations throughout pregnancy in the neighborhoods of women who delivered term singleton live births between 1996 and 2006 in California. We adjusted effect estimates of air pollutants on birth weight for infant characteristics, maternal characteristics, neighborhood socioeconomic factors, and year and season of birth.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>3,545,177 singleton births had monitoring for at least one air pollutant within a 10 km radius of the tract or ZIP Code of the mother's residence. In multivariate models, pollutants were associated with decreased birth weight; -5.4 grams (95% confidence interval -6.8 g, -4.1 g) per ppm carbon monoxide, -9.0 g (-9.6 g, -8.4 g) per pphm nitrogen dioxide, -5.7 g (-6.6 g, -4.9 g) per pphm ozone, -7.7 g (-7.9 g, -6.6 g) per 10 <it>μ</it>g/m³particulate matter under 10 μm, -12.8 g (-14.3 g, -11.3 g) per 10 <it>μ</it>g/m³particulate matter under 2.5 μm, and -9.3 g (-10.7 g, -7.9 g) per 10 <it>μ</it>g/m³of coarse particulate matter. With the exception of carbon monoxide, estimates were largely unchanged after controlling for co-pollutants. Effect estimates for the third trimester largely reflect the results seen from full pregnancy exposure estimates; greater variation in results is seen in effect estimates specific to the first and second trimesters.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study indicates that maternal exposure to ambient air pollution results in modestly lower infant birth weight. A small decline in birth weight is unlikely to have clinical relevance for individual infants, and there is debate about whether a small shift in the population distribution of birth weight has broader health implications. However, the ubiquity of air pollution exposures, the responsiveness of pollutant levels to regulation, and the fact that the highest pollution levels in California are lower than those regularly experienced in other countries suggest that precautionary efforts to reduce pollutants may be beneficial for infant health from a population perspective.</p

The Great American Crime Decline : Possible Explanations

This chapter examines the most important features of the crime decline in the United States during the 1990s-2010s but also takes a broader look at the violence declines of the last three centuries. The author argues that violent and property crime trends might have diverged in the 1990s, with property crimes increasingly happening in the online sphere and thus traditional property crime statistics not being reflective of the full picture. An important distinction is made between ‘contact crimes’ and crimes that do not require a victim and offender to be present in the same physical space. Contrary to the uncertainties engendered by property crime, the declines in violent (‘contact’) crime are rather general, and have been happening not only across all demographic and geographic categories within the United States but also throughout the developed world. An analysis of research literature on crime trends has identified twenty-four different explanations for the crime drop. Each one of them is briefly outlined and examined in terms of conceptual clarity and empirical support. Nine crime decline explanations are highlighted as the most promising ones. The majority of these promising explanations, being relative newcomers in the crime trends literature, have not been subjected to sufficient empirical scrutiny yet, and thus require further research. One potentially fruitful avenue for future studies is to examine the association of the most promising crime decline explanations with improvements in self-control