Do you want to avoid the hassle of traveling with your printed poster? IAPHS2026 is pleased to make poster printing available to you through our supplier PosterSessionOnline. Your poster will be professionally reviewed, printed and shipped directly to Portland and you will be able to pick it up from the Poster desk. Click here to learn more.
Primary Submission Category: Life-course/developmental
The potential for building life course residential histories through retrospective neighborhood data
Authors: Lisa Miller, Paul Delamater, Jaime Slaughter-Acey,
Presenting Author: Lisa Miller*
Introduction
Research on the longitudinal health impacts of neighborhoods is often limited by residential data that are either cross-sectional or limited to birth address obtained from vital records. This study presents a novel approach to building life-course residential history using participant recall in a sample of postpartum Black women.
Methods
Data were from the LIFE-2 cohort (2023-2025, Detroit, MI). Participants reported their current address, their address at birth, and their ages at 10 and 18 years. Address data was considered “Complete” if street-level, zip code, cross street, or landmark data was provided and “Incomplete” if data was missing or only city/state-level data was provided. Address completion was evaluated among participants who completed at least 50% of the survey (n=577). Birth address completion was further evaluated among a subset of mothers (n=202) with linked birth certificate (BC) data. We compared self-reported demographic and neighborhood characteristics by address data completion status at ages 18 and 10 to assess the potential impact of missingness.
Results
Among 577 participants, completion for residential address data was 100% for current address and 77.8%, 76.5%, and 55.6% for age-18, age-10, and birth addresses, respectively. For mothers with linked BC data, birth address completion rose to 99%. Compared with participants with incomplete age-18 address data, those with complete data were more likely to report a stable place to sleep during both pregnancy and childhood. Participants with complete (vs. incomplete) age-10 address data also reported higher mean current neighborhood safety and longer residence in their current neighborhood.
Conclusion
High completion rates support the use of address recall as a promising method for building life-course residential history, especially when combined with BC data. Missingness was unrelated to demographics but associated with current neighborhood characteristics.