Session: Novel Environmental Measures to Promote Health Equity (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

It is well established that place matters with respect to health and health outcomes. With respect to behavioral health, including violence, substance use, and mental health there is growing evidence that environmental risk is a strong predictor of behavior in highly disordered environments and may be a more salient predictor of high-risk behavior than individual-level risk factors.  The field of health equity research has been defined as the study of the context where people live, work and play and experience health.  Essential to the inquiry of health equity are understandings of how the environment shapes and influences opportunities for optimal (or sub-optimal) health. We have made great strides in measuring biological toxins, but that represents only one facet of risk and does not explain many of the structural factors that drive population- and community-level health inequities.  The primary gaps we have faced in public health were valid, reliable methods to measure environmental risk from a social determinants perspective. The current state of science with respect to environmental research is promising and the past decade has been marked by a period of rapid advancement in the methods, measures and analytic approaches to assessing the role of both the built and social environment on health and health behavior.  Current approaches for measuring environmental risk and protection rely on three primary set of methods of measurement, including 1) constructs based on Census variables, 2) self-report data, and 3) systematic social observations. Each of these approaches has its relative merits and weaknesses.  The best approach primarily relies upon the research questions. Advancements in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have also provided a valuable framework and a set of analytic tools for understanding and empirically clarifying how the built and social environment influence health and identify possible targets for structurally based preventive interventions. This symposium will provide an overview of the current state of environmental measures for methods to assess health equity as well as discuss three current advancements in the field including:  1) novel assessment methods that include nighttime assessments of neighborhood disorder, 2) novel measurement tools to assess health inequities, and 3) remote sensing technology to employ ‘desktop’ measures of the neighborhood environment.  These advancements build on recent advancements and offer promising new lines of research, service and advocacy in the field.