What’s this about?
The Built Environment & Health (BEH) project is an interdisciplinary program of research at Columbia University. Led by epidemiologist Andrew Rundle, BEH uses spatial data to examine the implications of the built environment, including land use, public transit, and housing, for physical activity, diet, obesity, and other aspects of health. With a focus on New York City, BEH research will inform public policy to promote health in the city and metropolitan area. BEH is affiliated with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program at Columbia.
Obesity, Physical Activity and Built Space in New York City
With funding from the Obesity and the Built Environment initiative of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, the BEH group is examining the association between built environment characteristics and physical activity, diet, and body size in three samples of New York City-area residents. The project uses three human health datasets:
Cross-sectional baseline data on Body Mass Index (BMI) from the New York Cancer Project, which includes about 18,000 health adult residents of New York City and the surrounding suburbs. The study includes a short survey on demographic characteristics as well as objective measures of height and weight.
Data from a prospective study of 1,000 children enrolled in New York City Head Start centers. The project, led by Judith Jacobson is collecting objectively measured data on height and weight as well as six consecutive days of accelerometer data on physical activity. After base-line data collection there will be two waves of annual follow-up data.
From a case-control study of breast cancer being conducted by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, objectively-measured data on height, weight, percent body fat, hip and waist circumference, and survey data on diet and physical activity from the healthy controls, including a total of 2,400 healthy black and Caucasian women in New York City. Co-investigator Julie Britton is an investigator on this study.
All three datasets include study subjects’ exact addresses, which will be geocoded for linkage to the built environment measures. In addition, each dataset includes measures of individual-level covariates such as age, sex, race and ethnicity, and socio-economic status which have been found to be predictive of physical activity, diet, and obesity.
Measures related to functionality refer to the structural features of the environment that influence the ease and efficiency of non-motorized transportation. Measures of connectivity will include street design measures such as intersection density block length, as well as hills.
Safety-related measures will include precinct-level crime statistics as well as data from police call logs. The density of vacant housing and of abandoned buildings may be associated with crime, or fear of crime, because it reduces local surveillance and provides venues for illegal activity. To assess traffic safety, we use data on the location of all injuries and deaths resulting from an automobile hitting a pedestrian from 1995-2001.
For measures of aesthetics, we are using park rating data from the Department of Parks and Recreation’s Parks Inspection Program, as well as the Department’s Central Forestry division’s census of street trees. For comparable measures of green space in New York City and the surrounding suburbs, we will use summer-time aerial photographs of the metropolitan area.
Destination-related measures include population density and land use mix as well as more fine-grained measures using data from Dun and Bradstreet on business type and location and publicly available data on public or nonprofit destinations such as libraries, schools, and community gardens. Access to public transit will be coded using Metropolitan Transit Authority route maps. Our analyses of diet and BMI will distinguish types of food vendors (convenience stores, supermarkets, farmers markets) and restaurants (“fast food” vs. other types of restaurants) using Dun and Bradstreet data. Our analyses of physical activity and BMI will distinguish destinations relevant to recreational physical activity, including both public and private facilities.
To compare our results with existing research, we will conduct some analyses using the census tract as the neighborhood measure; these analyses will employ multilevel models. A parallel set of analyses will define the neighborhood as the half-mile buffer around the study subject’s residence.
In addition to this quantitative analysis, we plan a series of qualitative interviews with Latino mothers of young children. Pilot analysis of the Head Start data revealed that the children of women born in New York City have different physical activity profiles than children of foreign-born women. The qualitative interviews will explore acculturation to the specific features of the New York City built environment.
Funding is provided by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, Award No. 1R01ES014229-01, from September 2006 through August 2009. Project personnel include principal investigator Andrew Rundle; co-investigators Julie Britton, Ana Diez Roux, Sam Field, Lance Freeman, Judith Jacobson, Kathryn Neckerman, Yoosun Park, Christopher Weiss, and Christine Williams; and research associates Shang-Min Liu, Marnie Purciel, and James Quinn.
