Community Mapping of Environmental Hazards and Barriers in an Immigrant Populatio

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Community Mapping of Environmental Hazards and Barriers in an Immigrant Population Abstract The proposed project addresses broad Challenge Area (09), Health Disparities, and specific Challenge Topic 09-ES-101, "Building trust between researchers and communities through capacity building in Environmental Public Health". It is designed to address a major gap in health prevention for minority communities by bringing together researchers and members of an underserved racial/ethnic community to produce a collaboratively developed profile of neighborhood environmental hazards and barriers to health care access. In particular, this work will build on a developmental community-based participatory research project focused on the recently high profile concerns of health risks from chemical exposures in the burgeoning nail salon industry, an industry dominated in California by Vietnamese immigrant workers. With that as a starting point, we will conduct an equal partnership community mapping project, bringing expertise in the use of geographic information systems (GIS) tools from the research partner together with the knowledge and perceptions of the community partner to characterize neighborhood work and residential environments influencing the health risks of Vietnamese immigrants. It is anticipated that this partnership will provide greater insights into factors associated with the increasing adverse health experience of Vietnamese immigrants in the US, as well as provide an opportunity to empower community members to better illustrate and articulate their concerns to the health care establishment and local government. The aims of this community mapping project are to: 1) Identify community-perceived economic, environmental, social and built environmental stressors and health access barriers through a series of focus groups with Vietnamese community members, stratified by general age groups. 2) Create initial community maps using existing data sources to characterize differences in economic, environmental, social and built environmental stressors across neighborhoods. 3) Develop and implement a community mapping survey tool for collecting neighborhood-level information to enhance baseline community maps (Aim 2). a. Develop a community mapping survey instrument to collect information on community-perceived stressors and barriers (identified from Aim 1). b. Engage Vietnamese nail salon workers in the collection of neighborhood data to describe community- perceived stressors and barriers. c. Collect air monitoring data on diesel exhaust, an air contaminant of known high community concern, to assess differences in levels across neighborhoods and evaluate existing data on this contaminant. 4) Develop enhanced community maps using existing and newly-collected data (Aim 3) to describe variations in neighborhood economic, environmental, social and built environmental stressors. Community Mapping of Environmental Hazards and Barriers in an Immigrant Population Project Narrative The proposed community mapping project is designed to address a major gap in health prevention for minority communities by bringing together researchers and members of an underserved racial/ethnic community to produce a collaboratively developed profile of neighborhood environmental hazards and barriers to health care access. Focusing on the Vietnamese immigrant population, we will conduct an equal partnership mapping project, bringing expertise in the use of geographic information systems (GIS) tools from the research partner together with the knowledge and perceptions of the community partner to characterize neighborhood work and residential environments influencing the health risks of Vietnamese immigrants. This work will build on a developmental community-based participatory research project focused on the recently high profile concerns of health risks from chemical exposures in the burgeoning nail salon industry, an industry dominated in California by Vietnamese immigrant workers.