Examining Neighborhood Profiles Defined by Place-Based Community Features and their Relationships with Firearm Violence Disparities

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PROJECT ABSTRACT Black Americans are over six times more likely to experience an assault-related firearm injury compared to White Americans. Thus, while a White American is admitted to the hospital due to firearm assault every 2 days, a Black American is admitted every 9 hours. Residential segregation, vacant and abandoned properties, neighborhood walkability, and green space access represent key place-based community features of the urban environment that contribute to Black Americans’ elevated gun violence exposure. However, existing research has relied on regression-based statistical techniques focused on the independent, variable-centered relationships that these features share with firearm violence. There is a critical need for a comprehensive examination of the joint effects of these place-based features that utilizes a place-centered technique. Such a technique will reveal how these place-based community features interact to create neighborhood profiles that position Black Americans for gun violence exposure. The proposed project will utilize latent profile analysis – a place-centered, latent variable classification technique – to fill this knowledge gap using existing data on the N = 1644 populated census blocks from the City of Syracuse, NY. Data will be obtained from several sources including the US Decennial Census (residential segregation, neighborhood walkability), the City of Syracuse (vacant and abandoned properties, green space access), the Central New York Crime Analysis Center (firearm fatalities), and the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center (non-fatal firearm injuries). These data will be linked at the census block level to complete the following aims: 1) To assess how residential segregation, vacant and abandoned properties, neighborhood walkability, and green space access combine to form distinct neighborhood profiles; 2) To determine how different neighborhood profiles characterized by unique combinations of these place-based community features display different levels of firearm violence (firearm fatalities and non-fatal firearm injuries). Collectively, these aims will advance our overall objective to further precision public health efforts that more effectively reduce Black Americans’ firearm violence exposure. This will be achieved by informing policy and prevention strategies that are tailored to the pattern of place- based features defining those neighborhoods that confer the greatest gun violence exposure risk. The project’s focus on the influences of the sociocultural and physical environment on Black Americans’ firearm violence exposure embeds it within NIMHD’s research framework and directly addresses NIMHD’s interest in understanding the antecedents of violence in health disparity populations (NOT-MD-18-006).