Redefining Neighborhoods Using Common Destinations: Social Characteristics of Activity Spaces and Home Census Tracts Compared

Abstract

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.

Understanding perceptions of community participation in persons with severe mental illness: A mixed-methods approach

“…Seven of the nine participants in the smallest activity space size category (<5 km) have lives in these spaces that converge with traditional understandings of community: a physical presence in a geographic area that includes social contact with others and engagement with meaningful places. These participants were strongly connected to cultural or religious communities or social service organizations, which were located in close proximity to their home addresses (ID 15,8,4,2,16,27,28). For these participants, small activity spaces reflected social ties within a local geographic area, consistent with results from previous studies where people with smaller activity spaces were shown to experience a stronger sense of community.…”

“…Typically in studies examining the derivation of activity space areas, the Standard Deviational Ellipse (SDE) has been used to determine the directional distribution of a person's use of spaces. [16][17][18][19] While this approach provides a strong indication of the direction of a person's activities within their proximal community, outlier activity points can lead to an overestimation of the size of activity space. [20][21][22][23][24] To address this problem, the current study used a mean circle approach.…”

Exploring the Relation of Spatial Access to Fast Food Outlets With Body Weight: A Mediation Analysis

“…Less educated individuals tend to consume more takeaway foods than do more highly educated individuals (Miura, Giskes, & Turrell, 2012), and there is some evidence that the consumption of takeaway foods high in sugar and salt can explain differences in body mass index between the least and most educated (Miura & Turrell, 2014). As such, the effects of the local food environment on weight status may be strongest in people of low SES because their activity spaces-that is, the areas they use for their daily routines-are generally smaller than those of individuals of high SES (Jones & Pebley, 2014), leading to a higher dependence on the direct neighborhood environment.…”

Comparing the Data Quality of GPS Devices and Smartphones for Assessing Relationships between Place, Mobility, and Health: A Field Study (Preprint)

“…Multiple methods have been proposed for converting raw spatial information into a representation of an activity space [21], such as the use of Census Tracts [22,36], the characteristics of known destinations [23], or constructing standard deviational ellipses from location information [37,38]. Tailored approaches include travel time polygons describing an area of potential travel, road network buffers of routes to regular destinations, or daily path areas constructed from actual routes taken [17,39].…”

“…This is important since recent research has shown that environmental characteristics of such non-residential places are associated with health-related outcomes, such as self-rated health [16] and dietary intake [17][18][19]. Therefore, a growing number of studies on health, place, and mobility are using an analytical approach that involves constructing an activity space for each participant (e.g., [20][21][22][23]). This concept, proposed by space-time geographers, describes the portion of the environment actually used by an individual to fulfill activities and travel between locations [24][25][26].…”