Redefining Exposure: Using Mobile Technology and Geospatial Analysis to Explore When and Where Chicago Adolescents are Exposed to Neighborhood Characteristics

Abstract

Differences in how individuals navigate and interact with physical space have clear implications for when and where they are exposed to environmental characteristics. To address this reality, we propose and test a novel method with a sample of Chicago adolescents that links individual GPS coordinates with locations of environmental characteristics as a strategy to increase precision in the measurement of environmental exposures. We use exposure to violent crime as an example and link the GPS coordinates of 51 youth collected over a one‐week period during the summer of 2016 to locations and times of violent crime. We explore different spatial and temporal parameters to determine whether an exposure occurred. Using the 660‐foot (201 m), 24‐hour operationalization, we found that youth were exposed to a total of 126 violent crimes, with an average of 3.82 (SD = 3.24) per respondent. This was higher than the 12 that were identified when exposure was calculated as the number of violent crimes occurring within 660 feet (201 m) of youths’ residential addresses during the week‐long assessment period. Examining correlations between the different exposure variables and measures of youths’ psychological functioning, we found the largest relationships when using the GPS‐based indices. We present a strategy for measuring exposure to environmental characteristics using GPS data. Higher rates of crime exposure are found based on GPS coordinates than with residential address. GPS‐based exposure measures are related to youths' psychological functioning.

Place‐Based Developmental Research: Conceptual and Methodological Advances in Studying Youth Development in Context

“…Exemplar 1: Exploring How "In-The-Moment" Exposure to Spatial Structures and Processes Shape Youth Mood Exemplar number 1, from Roy et al (2021), highlights situational exposures in time and space, a key feature of our cultural-developmental activity space framework. Tseng and Seidman (2007) and others (C. R. Browning, Calder, Soller, et al, 2017) have described the immediate social and physical environment aspects (objects, people, events) of a setting at a specific point in time as situations.…”

“…A detailed description of this methodology is beyond the scope of this piece. We refer interested readers to Roy et al (2021) for additional details.…”

“…Although survey‐based approaches can easily be incorporated in interview or survey studies, existing methods rely on selection of settings that are routine, common, and influential. In contrast, passive methods have used trace data from social media platforms (e.g., Twitter; Wang et al, 2018) and GPS estimates from smartphones to identify locations that people visit throughout the day (C. R. Browning, Calder, Ford, et al, 2017; C. R. Browning et al, 2021; Roy et al, 2021; Sugie & Lens, 2017; Witherspoon et al, 2019; York Cornwell & Cagney, 2017). These approaches match location estimates to administrative units (e.g., census block groups) to analyze contextual characteristics of settings.…”

Crime Risk and Depression Differentially Relate to Aspects of Sleep in Patients with Major Depression or Social Anxiety

“…Second, we did not verify the length a participant resided at their location; thus, exposure to crime risk may have differed among participants due to moving. Also, objective neighborhood characteristics where an individual resides do not take into account other places an individual may spend considerable time at (e.g., work, school) [65] or perceived crime, which has been shown to differ from objective crime [66]. Third, other neighborhood factors that adversely affect sleep (e.g., unwanted noise, public drug use) [25] were not collected; it is possible that neighborhood factors outside of crime risk play a more prominent role in sleep among individuals with internalizing conditions.…”