Article Text
Abstract
Background Little is known about how diet-related and activity-related amenities relate to residential location behaviour. Understanding these relationships is essential for addressing residential self-selection bias.
Methods Using 25 years (6 examinations) of data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study (n=11 013 observations) and linked neighbourhood-level data from the 4 CARDIA baseline cities (Birmingham, Alabama; Chicago, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Oakland, California, USA), we characterised participants’ neighbourhoods as having low, average or high road connectivity and amenities using non-hierarchical cluster analysis. We then used repeated measures multinomial logistic regression with random effects to examine the associations between individual-level sociodemographics and neighbourhood-level characteristics with residential neighbourhood types over the 25-year period, and whether these associations differed by individual-level income.
Results Being female was positively associated with living in neighbourhoods with low (vs high) road connectivity and activity-related and diet-related amenities among high-income individuals only. At all income levels, a higher percentage of neighbourhood white population and neighbourhood population <18 years were associated with living in neighbourhoods with low (vs high) connectivity and amenities. Individual-level race; age; and educational attainment, neighbourhood socioeconomic status and housing prices did not influence residential location behaviour related to neighbourhood connectivity and amenities at any income level.
Conclusions Neighbourhood-level factors appeared to play a comparatively greater role in shaping residential location behaviour than individual-level sociodemographics. Our study is an important step in understanding how residential locational behaviour relates to amenities and physical activity opportunities, and may help mitigate residential self-selection bias in built environment studies.
- DIET
- EPIDEMIOLOGY
- Neighborhood/place
- PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
- SOCIAL INEQUALITIES
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors PER had full access to the data and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. PER performed the statistical analysis, and analysed and interpreted the data. PER and PG-L drafted the article. DKG, JMS, JPR and PG-L critically revised the article for important intellectual content. PG-L acquired the data, obtained the funding, approved the final draft of the article and supervised the study. All authors contributed to the study concept and design.
Funding This work was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) R01HL104580. The Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study (CARDIA) is supported by contracts HHSN268201300025C, HHSN268201300026C, HHSN268201300027C, HHSN268201300028C, HHSN268201300029C and HHSN268200900041C from the NHLBI, the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and an intra-agency agreement between NIA and NHLBI (AG0005). The authors are grateful to the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for general support (grant P2C HD050924 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)), the Nutrition Obesity Research Center (NORC), University of North Carolina (grant P30DK56350 from the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)), and to the Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS), University of North Carolina (grant P30ES010126 from the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)).
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.