To date, there has been little research on environmental factors to guide interventions and treatments to improve the health of persons aging with long-term physical disabilities. This project will begin to fill this gap in knowledge by examining the role of characteristics in the social and built environment as they interact with underlying impairments and activity limitations to either hinder or promote the full participation of individuals with physical disabilities in society. The project builds on previous work by linking multiple dimensions of the built and social environment to the health trajectories of individuals in the combined Medicare and Medicaid Data file over a period of 10 years (2007-2016).
The project focuses on those neighborhood characteristics hypothesized to be related to healthy aging with physical disability, including the density of recreational centers, public transportation, and neighborhood socioeconomic indicators. Researchers examine indicators of neighborhood safety (based on local crime statistics), since fear of crime may discourage individuals from fully accessing resources in their neighborhood. Based on previous work which showed that snow and ice keep older adults homebound, researchers are also including measures of average temperature and precipitation. Measures of street connectivity tap the connected routes within communities, which may facilitate access to social and physical resources. In addition, socioeconomic disadvantage, racial residential segregation, home foreclosure rates, and low employment opportunities, capture the social environment.
All the neighborhood built and social environment data has been made available to the larger research and user community through ICPSR (data sharing core).
NaNDA is moving! ICPSR is in the process of curating NaNDA measures and adding them to our data holdings. The current version of most NaNDA data is available as a series in our general archive. For the time being, you can still find some data in the NaNDA repository on openICPSR.