TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2017//
TI  - Street audits to measure neighborhood disorder: virtual or in-person?
JO  - American journal of epidemiology
A1  - Mooney, Stephen J.
A1  - Bader, Michael D. M.
A1  - Lovasi, Gina S.
A1  - Teitler, Julien O.
A1  - Koenen, Karestan C.
A1  - Aiello, Allison E.
A1  - Galea, Sandro
A1  - Goldmann, Emily
A1  - Sheehan, Daniel M.
A1  - Rundle, Andrew G.
SP  - 265
EP  - 273
VL  - 186
IS  - 3
N2  - Neighborhood conditions may influence a broad range of health indicators, including obesity, injury, and psychopathology. In particular, neighborhood physical disorder-a measure of urban deterioration-is thought to encourage crime and high-risk behaviors, leading to poor mental and physical health. In studies to assess neighborhood physical disorder, investigators typically rely on time-consuming and expensive in-person systematic neighborhood audits. We compared 2 audit-based measures of neighborhood physical disorder in the city of Detroit, Michigan: One used Google Street View imagery from 2009 and the other used an in-person survey conducted in 2008. Each measure used spatial interpolation to estimate disorder at unobserved locations. In total, the virtual audit required approximately 3% of the time required by the in-person audit. However, the final physical disorder measures were significantly positively correlated at census block centroids (r = 0.52), identified the same regions as highly disordered, and displayed comparable leave-one-out cross-validation accuracy. The measures resulted in very similar convergent validity characteristics (correlation coefficients within 0.03 of each other). The virtual audit-based physical disorder measure could substitute for the in-person one with little to no loss of precision. Virtual audits appear to be a viable and much less expensive alternative to in-person audits for assessing neighborhood conditions.<br><br>© The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 0002-9262
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwx004
ID  - ref1
ER  -