Primary Submission Category: Methodological approaches to studying public health
The Co-Creation of Healthfulness Indices to Inform Population-Level Studies of the Built Environment on Health
Authors: Richard Sadler,
Presenting Author: Richard Sadler*
In population-level studies—particularly those at the state or national level—built environment metrics are often treated individually and are derived from administrative sources such as the US census. But at smaller scales, similar studies (i.e. of patient records at local health systems) can benefit from the addition of rich, local data on the built environment to better inform understanding of the drivers of health and behavior (beyond biology). Additionally, certain features may matter more to populations depending on where they live.
This talk will focus on the process of community engagement in the co-creation of multi-variable built environment indices in 5 regions across Michigan and Florida. Project motivations included healthy eating, substance use prevention, health equity, and healthy aging. We argue that this kind of engagement can serve a range of purposes. Foremost, by engaging community partners in the kinds of GIS-based layers that may be of importance to a particular research study, partners become more connected to the research process and build understanding of potential links to the built environment. Second, their perspectives on these variables create a more informed weighting process than if researchers chose the weights on their own. Third, the resulting composite maps are seen as derivatives of community engagement and are thus valued as local knowledge.
Our work leverages community partners in assigning weights to a variety of built environment variables via the analytic hierarchy process derive these composite maps that suggest areas where carrying out healthful behaviors may be relatively easier or harder, depending on the aggregate of proximity to ‘good’ features and distance away from ‘bad’ features of the environment. The goal of this work is to link these hyperlocal scores to individuals’ addresses or activity spaces, to better measure each person’s environmental exposures.