Exposure of Neighborhood Racial and Socio-Economic Composition in Activity Space: A New Approach Adjusting for Residential Conditions.

A longstanding urban sociological literature emphasizes the geographic isolation of city dwellers in residence and everyday routines, expecting exposures to neighborhood racial and socio-economic structure driven principally by city-wide segregation and the role of proximity and homophily in mobility. The compelled mobility approach emphasizes the uneven distribution of organizational and institutional resources across urban space, expecting residents of poor Black-segregated neighborhoods to exhibit non-trivial levels of everyday exposure to White, non-poor areas for resource seeking. We use two sets of location data in the hypersegregated Chicago metro to examine these two approaches: Global Positioning System (GPS) location tracking on a sample of older adults from the study and travel diaries on a sample of younger adults by the .

Keeping Us Young? Grandchild Caregiving and Older Adults' Cognitive Functioning.

Objective: This study investigates longitudinal associations between providing care to grandchildren and cognitive functioning. It also examines heterogeneity in these relationships.

Background: Grandchild caregiving may support older adults' cognitive functioning by providing social engagement and emotional meaning.

Corrigendum: Momentary loneliness among older adults: Contextual differences and their moderation by gender and race/ethnicity.

Studies suggest that loneliness is associated with age. Among older adults, women and Black adults may be at greater risk than men and White adults, respectively. Social and physical contexts are also linked with loneliness.

Comparative assessment of the feasibility and validity of daily activity space in urban and non-urban settings.

Activity space research explores the behavioral impact of the spaces people move through in daily life. This research has focused on urban settings, devoting little attention to non-urban settings. We examined the validity of the activity space method, comparing feasibility and data quality in urban and non-urban contexts.

Under Different Roofs? Coresidence With Adult Children and Parents' Mental Health Across Race and Ethnicity Over Two Decades.

Many U.S. parents share a household with an adult child in later life.

Novel Insights From Interviewer Assessments of Personal Attributes, Home Environment, and Residential Context in NSHAP.

Objectives: This study was aimed to describe the interviewer-assessed measures present in the 2015/2016 Round of National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), outline strengths of interviewer-assessed measures, and explore how interviewer assessments in the domains of home environment and personal characteristics are associated with older adult health.

Method: Data come from the 2015/2016 Round of the NSHAP.

Results: We provide descriptive results from the interviewer assessments of personal attributes, indoor home environment, and outdoor residential context.

Resilience and Social Support-Giving Scales: Conceptual and Empirical Validation.

Objectives: This report introduces National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) data users to 2 new measures-one that assesses older adults' resilience, defined as personal attributes that indicate an adaptive reserve that can be drawn on during adversity, and a second that expands on existing measures of social support received from others to also assess social support given to close others.

Method: Data from 4,604 NSHAP respondents born 1920-1965 were used to conduct psychometric analyses and validation of our measures of resilience and social support-giving.

Results: Scale reliabilities were acceptable for the 4-item resilience scale, and the 2-item scales for family support-giving and friend support-giving.

Momentary loneliness among older adults: Contextual differences and their moderation by gender and race/ethnicity.

Rationale: Studies suggest that loneliness is associated with age. Among older adults, women and Black adults may be at greater risk than men and White adults, respectively. Social and physical contexts are also linked with loneliness.

The Foreclosure Crisis, Community Change, and the Cognitive Health of Older Adults.

Objectives: While home foreclosures are often thought of as a household-level event, the consequences may be far-reaching, and spill over to the broader community. Older adults, in particular, could be affected by the spiral of community changes that result from foreclosures, but we know very little about how the foreclosure crisis is related to older adult health, in particular cognition.

Method: This article uses growth curve models and data from the Health and Retirement Study matched to Census and county-level foreclosure data to examine whether community foreclosures are related to older adults' cognitive health and the mechanisms responsible.

Racial/Ethnic Inequities in Access to High-Quality Dialysis Treatment in Chicago: Does Neighborhood Racial/Ethnic Composition Matter?

Objectives: Blacks and Hispanics face a higher incidence rate of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) and tend to experience poorer access to quality health care compared with Whites. Income, education, and insurance coverage differentials are typically identified as risk factors, but neighborhood-level analyses may provide additional insights. We examine whether neighborhood racial composition contributes to racial/ethnic inequities in access to high-quality dialysis care in Chicago.

Social Isolation, Loneliness, And Violence Exposure In Urban Adults.

Social isolation is a key predictor of mortality in the US and may be heightened in communities affected by violence. Qualitative studies have documented that people living in high-crime neighborhoods often report being confined to their homes because of safety concerns. However, few quantitative studies have empirically assessed relationships between violence exposure and social isolation.

Disablement in Context: Neighborhood Characteristics and Their Association With Frailty Onset Among Older Adults.

Objectives: Frailty, an aggregate expression of risk resulting from age- or disease-associated physiologic accumulation, is responsible for large economic and societal costs. Little is known about how the context in which older adult's live may contribute to differences in frailty. This study clarifies the role of neighborhood structural characteristics and social processes for understanding declines in health status.

The impact of marital status on health care utilization among Medicare beneficiaries.

To explain prior literature showing that married Medicare beneficiaries achieve better health outcomes at half the per person cost of single beneficiaries, we examined different patterns of healthcare utilization as a potential driver.Using the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) data, we sought to understand utilization patterns in married versus currently-not-married Medicare beneficiaries. We analyzed the relationship between marital status and healthcare utilization (classified based on setting of care utilization into outpatient, inpatient, and skilled nursing facility (SNF) use) using logistic regression modeling.

Crime, Perceived Danger, and Adiposity: The Role of Gender.

We examine whether police-reported crime is associated with adiposity and examine to what extent the association between crime and adiposity is explained by perceived neighborhood danger with a particular focus on gender differences. Data are drawn from the wave of 2010-2011 National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project merged with information on neighborhood social environment and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) crime report. We use burglary as a main predictor.

Spatial Context and Health Inequity: Reconfiguring Race, Place, and Poverty.

Intimate connections among race, place, and poverty are increasingly featured in the health disparities literature. However, few models exist that can guide our understanding of these interconnections. We build on the Chicago School of Sociology's contributions in urban research and one of its contemporary elaborations, often described as the "neighborhood effects approach," to propose a three-axis model of health inequity.

The Role of Primary Care for the Oral Health of Rural and Urban Older Adults.

Context: Rural populations often have restricted access to dental care and poor oral health. These problems may disproportionately affect older blacks in rural areas. Little is known about how access to primary health care may improve the oral health of rural seniors.

Aging in Activity Space: Results From Smartphone-Based GPS-Tracking of Urban Seniors.

Objectives: Prior research emphasizes the importance of the residential neighborhood context during later life but little attention has been afforded to other areas that older adults encounter as they move beyond their residential environments for daily activities and social interactions. This study examines the predominance of the residential context within older adults' everyday lives.

Method: We provided 60 older adults in four New York City neighborhoods with iPhones, which captured Global Positioning Systems (GPS) locations at 5-min intervals over 1 week (n = 55,561) and 17 ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) over 4 days (n = 757) to assess real-time activities.

Neighborhood age structure and cognitive function in a nationally-representative sample of older adults in the U.S.

Recent evidence suggests that living in a neighborhood with a greater percentage of older adults is associated with better individual health, including lower depression, better self-rated health, and a decreased risk of overall mortality. However, much of the work to date suffers from four limitations. First, none of the U.

Social Resources and Community Resilience in the Wake of Superstorm Sandy.

Recovery efforts after natural disasters typically focus on physical infrastructure. In general less attention is paid to the social infrastructure that might impact the capacity of the community to rebuild. We examine perceptions of preparedness and recovery (markers of resilience at the community level) in the wake of Superstorm Sandy with a novel data set that includes a multi-mode survey of twelve neighborhoods severely affected by the storm.

Racial Differences in the Effects of Neighborhood Disadvantage on Residential Mobility in Later Life.

Objectives: Past research on the residential mobility of older adults has focused on individual-level factors and life course events. Less attention has been paid to the role of the residential environment in explaining residential mobility in older adults. We sought to understand whether neighborhood disadvantage had predictive utility in explaining residential relocation patterns, and whether associations differed between Whites and non-Whites.

Constructing a Time-Invariant Measure of the Socio-economic Status of U.S. Census Tracts.

Contextual research on time and place requires a consistent measurement instrument for neighborhood conditions in order to make unbiased inferences about neighborhood change. We develop such a time-invariant measure of neighborhood socio-economic status (NSES) using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses fit to census data at the tract level from the 1990 and 2000 U.S.

Do Local Social Hierarchies Matter for Mental Health? A Study of Neighborhood Social Status and Depressive Symptoms in Older Adults.

Objectives: Despite a well-established association between relative social position and health, stratification at smaller levels of social organization has received scant attention. Neighborhood is a localized context that has increasing relevance for adults as they age, thus one's relative position within this type of mesolevel group may have an effect on mental health, independent of absolute level of social and economic resources. We examine the relationship between an older adult's relative rank within their neighborhoods on two criteria and depressive symptoms.

Religious Influence on Older Americans' Sexual Lives: A Nationally-Representative Profile.

This study investigated the relationship between religious influence and sexual expression in older Americans, with specific attention to gender. Using the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, a nationally-representative survey of older adults, we created a composite measure of religious influence on sexual expression using Latent Class Analysis. We found more variability within denominations than between in terms of membership in the high-influence class; this indicated that religious influence on sexual expression was diverse within faiths.

Proximity Does Not Equal Access: Racial Disparities in Access to High Quality Dialysis Facilities.

Background: For patients receiving hemodialysis, distance to their dialysis facility may be particularly important due to the need for thrice weekly dialysis. We sought to determine whether African-Americans and Whites differ in proximity and access to high quality dialysis facilities.

Methods: We analyzed urban, Whites and African-Americans aged 18-65 receiving in-center hemodialysis linked to data on neighborhood and dialysis facility quality measures.