Direct observation of neighborhood attributes in an urban area of the US south: characterizing the social context of pregnancy.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Neighborhood characteristics have been associated with poor maternal and child health outcomes, yet conceptualization of potential mechanisms is still needed. Census data have long served as proxies for area level socioeconomic influences. Unique information captured by neighborhood inventories, mostly conducted in northern US and Canadian urban areas, has shown important aspects of the community environment that are not captured by the socioeconomic and demographic aggregated individual statistics of census data. In this paper, we describe a neighborhood data collection effort tailored to a southern urban area.

Methods

This study used data from the Pregnancy, Nutrition and Infection (PIN) prospective cohort study to describe neighborhoods where low- and moderate-

SUBMITTER: Laraia BA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1444926 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature