CREATING MEASURES OF THEORETICALLY RELEVANT NEIGHBORHOOD ATTRIBUTES AT MULTIPLE SPATIAL SCALES

Abstract

Accurately measuring attributes in neighborhood environments allows researchers to study the influence of neighborhoods on individual-level outcomes. Researchers working to improve the measurement of neighborhood attributes generally advocate doing so in one of two ways: improving the theoretical relevance of measures and correctly defining the appropriate spatial scale. The data required by the first, "ecometric" neighborhood assessments on a sample of neighborhoods, are generally incompatible with the methods of the second, which tend to rely on population data. In this article, the authors describe how ecometric measures of theoretically relevant attributes observed on a sample of city blocks can be combined with a geostatistical method known as kriging to develop city block-level estimates across a city that can be configured to multiple neighborhood definitions. Using a cross-validation study with data from a 2002 systematic social observation of physical disorder on 1,663 city blocks in Chicago, the authors show that this method creates valid results. They then demonstrate, using neighborhood measures aggregated to three different spatial scales, that residents' perceptions of both fear and neighborhood disorder vary substantially across different spatial scales.

Keywords: cross-validation; kriging; neighborhoods; physical disorder; spatial analysis; spatial scale.

Figure 1

Diagram of a hypothetical neighborhood with streets and tract boundaries drawn.

Figure 2

Variogram of physical disorder with experimental variogram at bin width 1,000 meters and exponential theoretical variogram (see equation 8).

Figure 3

Histogram of error between interpolated and measured value of physical disorder on reserved sample of blocks.

Figure 4

Mean and variance of errors obtained by subtracting estimated values from observed values on 555 reserved blocks by deciles of the average distance to the five nearest points.

Figure 5

Map of kriged estimates of physical disorder at the city-block level with neighborhood cluster boundaries, with levels of disorder reported by standard deviation of estimates.