Field Exercise

Assessing the Social and Physical Environment of Three Toronto Neighbourhoods through a Letter Drop Experiment and Systemic Social Observation

Note: To do this assignment, you will need to visit: Description of Study Neighbourhoods and how to get there (web link)

Introduction

I feel that it is important to learn about the concepts and problems we are reading and discussing in class by applying them in the real world.  This assignment gives you the opportunity to go to a neighbourhood in Toronto you might not normally visit, perform a valuable data collection task, and describe and interpret your experience through writing.

A growing number of studies suggest that the characteristics of places matter in addition to the characteristics of people in determining levels of health and health disparities.  However, few studies have progressed beyond demonstrating that certain structural characteristics, such as neighbourhood poverty or disadvantage, exert a contextual influence on health after taking account of compositional characteristics (such as the socioeconomic status of residents).

Awareness of neighbourhood variations in health has existed since at least the 19^th century.  Today there is broad consensus that residents of disadvantaged communities experience worse health outcomes on average than those living in more prosperous areas.  Most researchers also agree that focusing on places and people represents a potentially fruitful avenue for interventions to improve the public health.  Disparities in neighbourhood characteristics – whether they be neighbourhood opportunity structures, or stresses in the physical and social environment – can help to explain the existence of health disparities.

In this assignment, you will contribute to an ongoing effort to assess three Toronto neighbourhood’s physical and social environments.  You are asked to complete two tasks:  (1) quasi-experimental letter drop, and (2) systematic social observation of a selected street block. 

Task 1. Assessing Social Capital with a Letter Drop Experiment

The concept of “social capital” has been advanced to describe the quality of community-level social interactions, and includes such indicators as the degree of sociability and solidarity among residents, the extent of reciprocal exchanges, as well as levels of trust and expectations of collective action.  Social capital has been recently applied to the health field to explain area variations in mortality and morbidity.  In ecological and multilevel analyses, state-level indicators of social capital -- such as levels of interpersonal trust, perceptions of reciprocity, and density of civic associations – have been shown to be strongly correlated with population mortality rates.  Recent evidence from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighbourhoods suggests that indicators of social capital (membership of civic groups, trust, and reciprocity) at the neighbourhood level are similarly associated with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality rates as well as traumatic causes of death.

Letter-drop methodology: The conventional approach to measuring neighbourhood social capital relies on the assessment of structural characteristics (such as the number of civic associations, and the extent of organizational membership), as well as cognitive characteristics (such as survey data relating to questions about trust).  As researchers have pointed out, structural characteristics are often only tangentially related to the key parameters of interest, while survey questions often rely on the honesty and understanding of subjects.

To overcome some of these limitations, some researchers have advocated the use of quasi-experimental approaches to elicit measures on psychosocial environment, such as trust.  A classic example is the so-called envelope drop game, in which individuals are asked for their willingness to pay for an envelope with their name on it to be dropped in different parts of a city, under different conditions (e.g., sealed, dropped at night, during the day, unsealed and unstamped, etc).  The level of willingness to pay for this envelope is thought to capture the degree to which individuals place trust in a random person in one of these locations.

An extension of this quasi-experimental approach has been recently implemented in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighbourhoods, a multilevel cohort study of the influence of neighbourhood contexts (including social capital) on health and developmental outcomes.  This method consists of actually dropping stamped, addressed envelopes on randomly selected street corners, and to assess the proportion of letters that are subsequently picked up and mailed.  Pilot data from the Chicago study reveal that there are substantial variations in the proportion of letters returned, and that these variations track neighbourhood differences in social capital as assessed by the community surveys on trust and social cohesion.

We will replicate these methods within three neighbourhoods in Toronto described below.  I have assigned each of you a particular neighbourhood labelled on the map.  Your instructions are to drop (i.e., on the sidewalk) two prepared letters that will be given to you in class.  When dropping the envelopes, drop them in a way that looks inadvertent (accidental).   Do not wait until no one is around.  If someone immediately tells you that "you dropped something," pick up the letter, make note of this, and drop the letter again 2 minutes later.  Mark the envelopes AND record separately the date and time you dropped the letter.  Each envelope contains a brief letter.  To standardize the experiment, all the letters are prepared in the same way.  I ask that you drop you letter during daylight hours at your assigned location during a two-week period.

Task 2. Assessing Social Disorganization by describing a streetscape

At the same time as performing the letter drop, I ask that you carry out a systematic social observation of your assigned street block. Answer the questions below and rate the appearance of street blocks using the checklist.

An aspect of the neighbourhood social environment that is associated with health and health behaviours is the presence of social disorder. Social disorder is defined by signs indicating a lack of social control.  Perceived neighbourhood disorder refers to visible cues indicating a lack of order and social control in the community. These cues are social and physical, where physical disorder is indicative of social disorder -- social and physical disorder are conceptualized as a continuum. There is an established tradition of examining aspects of the neighbourhood physical environment in relation to health outcomes, through measures such as noise, crowding, traffic patterns, and air pollution.  Ecometrics, a term devised by Raudenbush, is defined as the science of assessment of human ecological settings such as neighbourhoods.  Systematic social observation (SSO), one of the data collection methods used in ecometrics, provides measures of the neighbourhood environment that are independent of the perceptions of survey respondents and can capture aspects of the physical and social environment that are difficult to obtain from survey respondents.  When used in conjunction with other data collection strategies, SSO can provide an independent and reinforcing source of data for neighbourhood social and physical environment.  

Neighbourhood            _______________________________

Your Name                  _______________________________

Date of Letter Drop      _______________________________

Time of Letter Drop      _______________________________

Weather conditions __________________________________________

Describe where you dropped your letter ________________________

Describe what happened __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Have you received the letter in the mail? ___________________________When? _____________

(Please notify the instructor if you receive the letter after this date)

Perceived Neighbourhood Disorder

Compared to where I grew up....      

There is a lot of graffiti in this neighbourhood

This neighbourhood is noisy

There is a lot of crime in this neighbourhood

This neighbourhood is safe

This neighbourhood is clean

People in this neighbourhood take good care of their homes

Code sheet for systematic social observation of street blocks

Make note of whether or not you observe the following:

Task 3. Short Essay

Think broadly about the determinants of health most relevant to the community you visited.  As discussed in class (and January 18 readings), Fitzpatrick/LaGory describe health risks and resources, while Kaplan emphasizes a series of “nested” context that influence population health.  Please describe the determinants of health in the community you visited from the vantage of both of these perspectives (use no more than 1 page per perspective).

The Neighbourhoods

The purpose of this assignment is to go out into the city to observe and think about the risk and protections in particular neighbourhoods in Toronto.  I am sending you to one of three pre-selected neighbourhoods:

Your efforts are contributing to a larger study of urban health in Toronto.  For educational purposes, we will focus on comparing three disadvantaged communities in Toronto.  The first community is St. James Town, an area in downtown Toronto.  St. James Town is a high-density community on the east side of downtown. The two other areas (Yorkwoods and Warden Woods) are neighbourhoods with substantial public housing in the inner suburbs (North York and Scarborough).  Within Toronto, the suburbs (North York, Scarborough, and Etobicoke) have been most affected by decreasing average income levels, high unemployment, and growing poverty in the 1990s.  Neighbourhoods in these suburbs are also amongst the most diverse in Toronto in terms of immigration and the presence of people of color and visible minorities. 

St. James Town (East Side of Downtown Toronto)

ignore star on map--walk the neighbourhood bordered by Howard, Parliament, St. James Ave, and Bleecker St.

  Directions from the University

1. Take the Bloor line East to Sherbourne

2. Walk south on Sherbourne and then East on Howard until you reach the Northwest corner of the neighbourhood.

Grandravine/Yorkwoods Village (in Jane/Finch Area)

 Directions from the University

1. Take the subway North to Downsview

2. Take the 180 bus to Yorkwoods gate (on map)

Warden Woods (in Scarborough)

 Directions from the University

1. Take the Bloor subway line East to Warden exit.

2. get on Bus 69, take it two stops south to Fir Valley Court