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

• In Event: Novel Approaches to Operationalizing the Neighborhood Context

Abstract

Children who grow up exposed to neighborhood poverty and crime are more likely to develop internalizing and externalizing problems. While these relationships are consistent, the effects tend to be small. This may be a result of reliance on fixed measurements of risk that make the assumption that youth living in geographic proximity to each other perceive and interact with space similarly and that all relevant exposures occur in the residential neighborhood. This research addresses this limitation by using GPS coordinates collected from a sample of Chicago youth in conjunction with publically available information on environmental characteristics to create a more precise measure of youth’s exposure to environmental risk. We focus on exposure to violent crime as an example. We compare an exposure index created using conventional parameters (i.e. counts of the number of crimes occurring within youths’ residential census tract) against indices created using GPS coordinates collected from a sample of Black and Latinx youth over the course of a one-week period. In addition, we examine correlations between the crime exposure indices and youth’s self-reports of negative affect and behavioral and cognitive dysregulation to explore the relationships between crime indices and outcomes previously found to be related to youth’s exposure to violence
The sample for this study consised of 51 African American (80%) and Latinx (20%) youth who were on average 15.04 years old (SD = .73) at the time of data collection (summer of 2016). Youth were recruited from a larger, longitudinal study on development in the context of poverty. Youth were asked to carry GPS-enabled cell phones for a one-week period from which GPS coordinates were collected every minute resulting in an average of 3,998 data points per participant (SD = 2,462, Min = 252, Max = 9,296). Our GPS-based measure of exposure to violent crime was created by using GIS software to map youth’s GPS coordinates and then linking them with locations of violent crime (i.e. murder, rape, assault, robbery, and battery) available through Chicago’s Data Portal.
To descriptively examine the amount of crime experienced by our sample, spatial and temporal filters were created to explore rates of exposure across time and space (Table 1). Using the 660-foot (201 m), 24-hour operationalization of exposure 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 means that 126 of the GPS coordinates collected from youth fell within a 660-foot parameter (the approximate size of a Chicago city block) of and within the 24 hours following where and when a violent crime occurred. 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 youth’s 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 (Table 2).

Authors

• Amanda L. Roy, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Ashley Isaia, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author

• Andrea DaViera, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yohai Eisenberg, University of Illinois, Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chris Poulos, University of Illinois Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author