There Goes the Neighborhood: The Relationship Between the Built Environment and Birth Weight in Central Durham, NC
Abstract
This project seeks to understand the relationship between neighborhood quality and
birth weight in Central Durham, NC. Previous studies have shown that neighborhood
context influences birth outcomes, even after adjusting for individual maternal characteristics
and behaviors. Yet the traditional measures of neighborhood quality rely primarily
on US Census socioeconomic demographic data that only reflect the aggregation of characteristics
of individual residents to determine neighborhood conditions. These measures fail
to account for the physical disorder (i.e. broken windows, peeling paint) present
in the neighborhood’s built environment.
My study employs the recently developed Neighborhood Health Indices (NHI), which measure
neighborhood quality along eight separate domains: nuisances, housing damage, property
characteristics, security measures, crime level, amenities, tenure status and vacancy
at three different spatial resolutions. Using 2005-2007 birth data (N=2679) from the
North Carolina Detailed Birth Record, I performed a multivariable regression analysis
to explore the effects of neighborhood quality on birth weight after controlling for
individual maternal risk factors.
As predicted, the increased presence of nuisances, housing damage, property damage,
renter-occupied status, and vacant houses were correlated with a decrease in birth
weight. Proximity to amenities, increased security measures, and higher crime levels
did not correlate significantly with birth weight. Across all indices, the magnitude
and significance of the change in birth weight increased when widening the neighborhood
context from individual block to primary adjacency to secondary adjacency level. This
indicates that while living in a disadvantaged neighborhood can already be detrimental
to birth weight, living adjacent to other poor quality neighborhoods further exacerbates
these outcomes.
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Honors Thesis- Highest Distinction
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Honors thesisDepartment
Public Policy StudiesPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1689Citation
Ouyang, Rebecca (2009). There Goes the Neighborhood: The Relationship Between the Built Environment and Birth
Weight in Central Durham, NC. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1689.Collections
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