You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 59, Issue 10
  • Block observations of neighbourhood physical disorder are associated with neighbourhood crime, firearm injuries and deaths, and teen births

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Theory and methods
Block observations of neighbourhood physical disorder are associated with neighbourhood crime, firearm injuries and deaths, and teen births
  1. Evelyn Wei1,*,
  2. Alison Hipwell2,
  3. Dustin Pardini2,
  4. Jennifer M Beyers3,
  5. Rolf Loeber2
  1. 1Late of the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
  2. 2Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, University of Pittsburgh
  3. 3Casey Family Programs, Seattle, State of Washington, USA
  1. Correspondence to:
 Professor R Loeber
 Department of Psychiatry, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, 3811 O’Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; loeberrupmc.edu

Abstract

Study objective: To provide reliability information for a brief observational measure of physical disorder and determine its relation with neighbourhood level crime and health variables after controlling for census based measures of concentrated poverty and minority concentration.

Design: Psychometric analysis of block observation data comprising a brief measure of neighbourhood physical disorder, and cross sectional analysis of neighbourhood physical disorder, neighbourhood crime and birth statistics, and neighbourhood level poverty and minority concentration.

Setting: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US (2000 population = 334 563).

Participants: Pittsburgh neighbourhoods (n = 82) and their residents (as reflected in neighbourhood level statistics).

Main results: The physical disorder index showed adequate reliability and validity and was associated significantly with rates of crime, firearm injuries and homicides, and teen births, while controlling for concentrated poverty and minority population.

Conclusions: This brief measure of neighbourhood physical disorder may help increase our understanding of how community level factors reflect health and crime outcomes.

  • ICC, intraclass correlation
  • PDI, physical disorder index
  • neighbourhood
  • residence characteristics
  • public health
  • adolescent health
  • community health planning

https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.2004.027060

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • ↵* Evelyn Wei has died since this work was undertaken.

    • Funding: preparation of this article was supported in part by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH56630) and the National Institute of Drug Abuse (DA12237). Points of view or opinions in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the National Institute of Mental Health or the National Institute of Drug Abuse.

    • Conflicts of interest: none.

    • Ethics approval: there were no human subjects involved in the data collection for the purpose of the study described in this article. However, The Institutional Review Board at the University of Pittsburgh approved all protocols for the large scale study of which this data collection effort was a part.

    Linked Articles