Exploring the Import of Health-Related Residential Mobility to Local Area Studies

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Exploring the Import of Health-related Residential Mobility to Local Area Studies Description / Summary: Although most studies of place effects on health are ecological or multilevel analyses of cross-sectional data, findings are often interpreted as evidence that neighborhood context impacts health beyond the composition of the resident population. This interpretation implicitly assumes that local populations are static, although clearly they are dynamic, and the changes they experience could be health-related. If residential mobility across local areas is health-related, common contextual interpretations of cross-sectional findings might be misleading. Few investigators have addressed this question because few data sets provide information on health and migration and have sufficiently large samples to study migration across local areas. However, information on respondents' place of residence 5 years prior to the Census was collected to the ZIP code level for the first time in the 2000 Census, providing the opportunity to explore this research question. Yet, because ZIP code data for this item are relatively new and available only to investigators who successfully apply to use confidential census data, their quality has not been established. We have been authorized to analyze these data at the Michigan Census Research Data Center to test the hypothesis that selective migration contributes to the observed local geographic patterning of health. This exploratory and developmental project will build on our previous work by first updating to the year 2000 local area morbidity and mortality analyses we conducted for 1980 and1990 using standard demographic statistical techniques applied to census and vital statistics data. Second, we will explore the quality of 2000 Census data on prior place of residence at the ZIP code level. Third, we will estimate the association between health and the probability that a person moved into or out of our specific local areas between the years 1995 and 2000, and the impact of differential migration on the health of the population remaining in each area in 2000. The assessment of the validity of 2000 Census data on prior place of residence, overall, and for studying community-specific moves, in particular, is developmental. It will provide highly valuable information to the many researchers interested in neighborhood dynamics for various scientific purposes, including ones that are not health-related. In addition, because local area studies are increasingly used to inform public health policy, exploring whether selective migration is a sustainable competing explanation to place effects for understanding dramatic differences in mortality profiles observed across local areas is critical for identifying the most promising future directions for research on racial/ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities. Project / Narrative Researchers have found that where people live in the United States is associated with their health and life- expectancy, even among people of the same race, gender, or age or living in communities with similar socioeconomic characteristics. But most such studies cannot distinguish between whether this association reflects the impact of different social and physical environments on health or the possibility that people=s decision to move to new places might be related to their health. The proposed research uses new Census data that should allow us to distinguish between these competing explanations and, thus, may provide an improved basis for continued research and policy making to reduce social disparities in health.