Research on neighborhood effects has focused largely on residential neighborhoods, but people are exposed to many other places in the course of their daily lives—at school, at work, when shopping, and so on. Thus, studies of residential neighborhoods consider only a subset of the social-spatial environment affecting individuals. In this article, we examine the characteristics of adults’ “activity spaces”—spaces defined by locations that individuals visit regularly, in Los Angeles County, California. Using geographic information system (GIS) methods, we define activity spaces in two ways and estimate their socioeconomic characteristics. Our research has two goals. First, we determine whether residential neighborhoods represent the social conditions to which adults are exposed in the course of their regular activities. Second, we evaluate whether particular groups are exposed to a broader or narrower range of social contexts in the course of their daily activities. We find that activity spaces are substantially more heterogeneous in terms of key social characteristics, compared to residential neighborhoods. However, the characteristics of both home neighborhoods and activity spaces are closely associated with individual characteristics. Our results suggest that most people experience substantial segregation across the range of spaces in their daily lives, not just at home.

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In this paper, we present results from measuring physical disorder in Los Angeles neighborhoods. Disorder measures came from structured observations conducted by trained field interviewers. We examine inter-rater reliability of disorder measures in depth. We assess the effects of observation conditions on the reliability of reporting. Finally, we examine the relationships between disorder, other indicators of neighborhood status, and selected individual outcomes. Our results indicate that there is considerable variation in the level of agreement among independent observations across items, although overall agreement is moderate to high. Durable indicators of disorder provide the most reliable measures of neighborhood conditions. Circumstances of observation have statistically significant effects on the observers’ perceived level of disorder. Physical disorder is significantly related to other indicators of neighborhood status, and to children’s reading and behavior development. This result suggests a need for further research into the effects of neighborhood disorder on children.

Background Research on adolescent physical activity is mixed regarding the role of parent activity. This study tested parent encouragement, direct modeling, and perceived influence as moderators of objectively-measured (accelerometer) parent and child moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) associations. Methods Parent-child dyads (n = 423; Mchild age = 11.33 yrs.) wore accelerometers for 7 days; parents completed surveys. Hierarchical linear regression models tested moderation using a product of constituent terms interaction. Results Parent-reported encouragement moderated the association between parent and child MVPA (B = −.15, p = .01, ΔR2 = .02, p < .01). Among parents with lower MVPA, child MVPA was higher for children receiving high encouragement (M = 3.06, SE = .17) vs. low (M = 3.03, SE = .15, p = .02) and moderate encouragement (M = 3.40, SE = .09) vs. low (p = 0.04). Conclusions Physical activity promotion programs may use parent encouragement as a tool to boost child activity, but must consider other child and parent characteristics that could attenuate effects.