A NEIGHBORHOOD-LEVEL POTENTIAL HEALTH IMPACT SCORING TOOL TO SUPPORT LOCAL-LEVEL HEALTH IMPACT ASSESSMENTS.

Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) have quickly become a widely utilized tool for integrating health and health-related evidence and data into decision making processes across a range of projects and polices. Integrating and utilizing the wide range of available data can be daunting. To support communities seeking to engage in health impact assessments, we developed the Neighborhood Potential Health Impact Score (NPHIS) methodology.

The utility of a system dynamics approach for understanding cumulative health risk from exposure to environmental hazards.

The potential of system dynamics modeling to advance our understanding of cumulative risk in the service of optimal health is discussed. The focus is on exploring system dynamics modeling as a systems science methodology that can provide a framework for examining the complexity of real-world social and environmental exposures among populations-particularly those exposed to multiple disparate sources of risk. The discussion also examines how system dynamics modeling can engage a diverse body of key stakeholders throughout the modeling process, promoting the collective assessment of assumptions and systematic gathering of critical data.

Stress and health behaviors as potential mediators of the relationship between neighborhood quality and allostatic load.

Purpose: Neighborhood quality is associated with health. Increasingly, researchers are focusing on the mechanisms underlying that association, including the role of stress, risky health behaviors, and subclinical measures such as allostatic load (AL).

Methods: This study uses mixed-effects regression modeling to examine the association between two objective measures and one subjective measure of neighborhood quality and AL in an ethnically diverse population-based sample (N = 2706) from a medium-sized Texas city.

Subjective neighborhood assessment and physical inactivity: An examination of neighborhood-level variance.

Research suggests a linkage between perceptions of neighborhood quality and the likelihood of engaging in leisure-time physical activity. Often in these studies, intra-neighborhood variance is viewed as something to be controlled for statistically. However, we hypothesized that intra-neighborhood variance in perceptions of neighborhood quality may be contextually relevant.

Firearm carrying and concurrent substance use behaviours in a community-based sample of emerging adults.

Introduction: This paper examines associations between high-risk gun carrying and substance use in emerging adults (ages 18-22). The coexistence of these high-risk behaviours in a general population of emerging adults can have disastrous consequences.

Methods: Dating it Safe is an ongoing longitudinal (2010-2016) survey of emerging adults recruited from seven high schools in five south-east Texas-area school districts (current sample n=684).