Neighbourhoods in eco-epidemiologic research: Delimiting personal exposure areas. A response to Riva, Gauvin, Apparicio and Brodeur
Section snippets
Theoretical considerations on the definition of neighbourhoods
Referring to the “neighbourhood” as to a geographic area for which we aim to measure attributes, we now discuss a number of conceptual distinctions relevant to its definition (Chaix, 2009).
Operational delimitation of neighbourhoods
Based on this theoretical ground, we now review approaches to operationalise neighbourhood delimitations (Chaix, 2009).
Analytic treatment of neighborhood entities
In this final section, we are interested in strategies to compare alternative definitions of neighbourhood boundaries, to determine which is the most appropriate to capture the effect of an environmental exposure on health.
Conclusion
Our aim was to emphasize that eco-epidemiologic studies correlating neighbourhood characteristics with health should often conceptualise neighbourhoods as personal exposure areas, which should be carefully distinguished from territorial neighbourhoods as social collective entities. Overall, our recommendations for future research are (i) to consider both perceived and objectively experienced neighbourhoods, (ii) to account for the possibility of fuzzy rather than sharp, individual-specific
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