Developing a GIS-Based Online Survey Instrument to Elicit Perceived Neighborhood Geographies to Address the Uncertain Geographic Context Problem

Although neighborhood factors have been consistently associated with health, technological difficulties in eliciting self-defined neighborhoods from large cohorts have compromised the interpretability of this research. Here, we offer a mixed-methods approach to elicit and validate self-defined neighborhoods. Participants used a customized Google.Maps interface to “draw” their neighborhood and answered questions about perceived map accuracy, neighborhood definition, and neighborhood activities. We compared geographic concordance of drawn and narrative neighborhood definitions, quantified differential accuracy by demographic characteristics, and examined factors influencing neighborhood definitions. We found similar geographic concordance between narrative and mapped boundaries in two cities, with no differences by neighborhood size. Self-reported neighborhoods had greater concordance with larger administrative areas (e.g., police precincts) than for smaller units (e.g., census tracts). To delineate their n...