“Contextualizing Context”: Reconciling Environmental Exposures, Social Networks, and Location Preferences in Health Research

Abstract

Significant advances in environmental or neighborhood effects have been made in the last decades. Specifically, conceptual and methodological developments have improved our consideration of spatial processes, shifting from a residential-based view of context to a more dynamic activity space and daily mobility paradigm. Yet, such advances have led to overlooking other potentially important aspects related to social networks and decision-making processes. With an increasing capacity to collect high-precision data on daily mobility and behavior, new possibilities in understanding how environments relate to behavior and health inequalities arise. Two overlooked aspects need to be addressed: the questions of "with or for whom", and "why". While the former calls for a better consideration of social networks and social interactions, the latter calls for refining our understanding of place preference and decision-making leading to daily mobility and multiple exposures.

Integrating activity spaces in health research: Comparing the VERITAS activity space questionnaire with 7-day GPS tracking and prompted recall

“…Increasing median distances across these categories are probably linked to an increased inverse probability to actually visit one of these destinations during an 'accute' seven-day GPS survey period. Furthermore, visited workplace, shopping, and transportation destinations are probably more fixed in space than recreational and social places -for which VERITAS-GPS distances were larger [23]. Furthermore, longer times spent at home or workplace may also translate into better spatial precision in GPS location detection.…”

“…GPS tracking is increasingly being used, sometimes in combination with accelerometers [16,17,20], heart rate, or other sensors [21]. GPS data can further be used to locate complementary qualitative data such as perceptions (momentary assessment) while providing an objective account of travel, activity locations [22], or, potentially, social connections [23]. Whereas GPS trackers generate fine-grained spatial and temporal location information, a number of limitations exist.…”

“…Such questionnaires can furthermore be adapted to specific research questions, and allow qualitative assessment of places, or delimitation of areas of significance such as perceived residential neighborhoods [27,28]. Complementary questions regarding with whom people visit places further allows to generate participants' spatialized social network [23].…”

Inference and analysis across spatial supports in the big data era: Uncertain point observations and geographic contexts

“…For example, advances in multi‐level modeling methods allow differentials in individual outcomes to be apportioned more accurately between individual factors and contextual influences that span a range of spatial and temporal scales. This modeling framework provides a more nuanced treatment of individual–contextual relationships than was possible with earlier approaches, which conceived of person–environment relationships through a simple ecological representation (Chaix, Merlo, & Chauvin, ; Kestens, Wasfi, Naud, & Chaix, ). Similar trends are evident in other fields that rely on spatial processing and representation, such as wildlife research, where concepts of habitat and home range have been recast as multi‐scale, hierarchical, spatially dependent, and uneven in spatial and temporal usage compared with earlier static models (Kie et al, ; McGarigal, Wan, Zeller, Timm, & Cushman, ), calling into question the utility of core conceptual constructs as new data and associated modeling tools become more widely used (Kie et al, ).…”

Feasibility and Validity of Geographically Explicit Ecological Momentary Assessment With Recall‐Aided Space‐Time Budgets

“…In response to this concern, a move toward the concept of activity spaces has emerged, which defines the relevant exposure space as including places individuals go in the course of routine activities and the people they encounter in those spaces (Graif, Gladfelter, & Matthews, ; Jones & Pebley, ; Kwan, ; Noah, ; Sharp, Denney, & Kimbro, ; Sugie & Lens, ). In this view, collecting spatiotemporal data on individuals’ activity patterns provides an opportunity to test theories about contextual effects on adolescent outcomes with substantially enhanced validity, incorporating both neighborhood and potentially significant extra‐neighborhood exposures (Browning & Soller, ; Kestens, Wasfi, Naud, & Chaix, ; Matthews & Yang, ).…”