Measurement of Neighborhood Context in an Urban Cohort of HIV-Infected or at Risk Low-Income Women

ABSRACT

The study of neighborhood disadvantage and health relies on census socioeconomic data but would benefit from reliable survey measures of factors that influence health within low income communities. The Perceptions of Neighborhood Environment Scale (PNES) was developed for use in the general U.S. population, and its measurement properties in a cohort of women who are low income and urban living with or at risk for HIV are described. The scale and all but one subscale have good psychometric and ecometric reliability, as well as convergent, construct, and concurrent validity, and are not collinear with household and community area income in low-income urban neighborhoods.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• HIV/AIDS
• Hierarchical Linear Modeling
• poverty measurement
• survey research

Acknowledgements

Data in this manuscript were collected by the Chicago site of the Women’s Interagency HIV Study (WIHS). The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). WIHS (Principal Investigators): Chicago WIHS (Mardge Cohen and Audrey French), U01-AI-034993; WIHS Data Management and Analysis Center (Stephen Gange and Elizabeth Golub), U01-AI-042590.

Funding

The Chicago WIHS is funded primarily by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with additional co-funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Additional information

Funding

The Chicago WIHS is funded primarily by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with additional co-funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).