Mapping Residents' Perceptions of Neighborhood Boundaries: A Methodological Note

TLDR

Studies of neighborhood effects on children and youth may be biased because they often use census units as proxies for neighborhoods. The study aimed to test resident‑drawn mapping methods for defining neighborhoods and compare them to census definitions. The authors used resident‑drawn maps to create neighborhood units and compared them to census‑defined units. Resident‑defined boundaries produced units that differed in spatial extent and social indicator values from census units, and residents varied in agreement about boundaries, indicating that discrepancies between researcher and resident definitions may bias neighborhood effect studies.

Abstract

Neighborhood influences on children and youth are the subjects of increasing numbers of studies, but there is concern that these investigations may be biased, because they typically rely on census-based units as proxies for neighborhoods. This pilot study tested several methods of defining neighborhood units based on maps drawn by residents, and compared the results with census definitions of neighborhoods. When residents' maps were used to create neighborhood boundary definitions, the resulting units covered different space and produced different social indicator values than did census-defined units. Residents' agreement about their neighborhoods' boundaries differed among the neighborhoods studied. This pilot study suggests that discrepancies between researcher and resident-defined neighborhoods are a possible source of bias in studies of neighborhood effects.