Is accessibility in the eye of the beholder? Social inequalities in spatial accessibility to health-related resources in Montréal, Canada

Abstract

Traditional measures of spatial accessibility overlook neighbourhood experiences.  Social gradient in resource accessibility vary with neighbourhood definition.  Half-mile buffers mask social variations observed in neighbourhood experiences.  Self-defined neighbourhoods are larger for higher social groups.

An Integrated Analysis of Social, Economic, and Environmental Indicators’ Effects on Public Health and Health Inequality Globally: From the Perspective of Vulnerability

“…Research on health science shows that it is popular for scholars to consider the spatial heterogeneity of health-related determinants (Vallée et al, 2020 ). Thus, the geographically weighted regression (GWR) models were conducted to clarify the country level heterogeneity of the vulnerability effects on public health and health inequality.…”

Everyday Geography and Service Accessibility: The Contours of Disadvantage in Relation to Mental Health

“…Participants' residential and activity locations were geocoded and served as anchor points for delineating 800-meter circular buffers. The buffer size was chosen in accordance with the median size of the self-reported neighbourhood of residence among respondents (Vallée et al 2020). Participants' residential areas were operationalized as the buffer centred on their residential location, while activity spaces were defined as the combination of buffers around each participant's residential and unique out-of-home activity locations.…”

“…Uniform areas (in our case, 800-meter circular buffers) around residential and activity locations may not necessarily capture the services which are actually spatially accessible. Recent studies have in fact underlined that constant-size circular or road-network buffers do not coincide with self-defined neighbourhoods, and that socially advantaged people experience larger areas around their residence than their more socially disadvantaged counterparts (Vallée et al 2015(Vallée et al , 2020. By counting services located within uniform areas, we have neglected socially-patterned place experiences, and thus potentially underestimated the number of services socially advantaged people can effectively access, and overestimated those that are spatially accessible for more socially disadvantaged people.…”

Examining the effects of residential location and stated residential preferences on activity space size and centricity

“…Study designs focusing on the participants' perceptions of the residential environment are among the most common approaches to study the environmental correlates of physical activity without a spatial reference. While subjective environmental perceptions can be treated as spatially referenced data if the geographic extent of the neighborhood is clearly defined or respondents-mapped neighborhood boundaries are used (e.g., Vallée et al, 2020), usually the spatial context is defined following a subjective neighborhood extent.…”

“…Analytically, these geographies can be approached not only relying on Euclidean distance but also on the relative importance of the place as defined through subjective evaluation. Regarding environmental health promotion research, this kind of spatial data can help us to understand how individual place experiences-and not only environmental opportunities or the lack of them-contribute to the production of health (Vallée et al, 2020). For instance, the spatial approach developed in Article III to study the restorative benefits of diverse physical activity environments exemplifies how participatory mapping data can be used to merge institutional spatial data with subjective environmental perceptions.…”