title: Development and deployment of the Computer Assisted Neighborhood Visual Assessment System (CANVAS) to measure health-related neighborhood conditions.
abstract: Public health research has shown that neighborhood conditions are associated with health behaviors and outcomes. Systematic neighborhood audits have helped researchers measure neighborhood conditions that they deem theoretically relevant but not available in existing administrative data. Systematic audits, however, are expensive to conduct and rarely comparable across geographic regions. We describe the development of an online application, the Computer Assisted Neighborhood Visual Assessment System (CANVAS), that uses Google Street View to conduct virtual audits of neighborhood environments. We use this system to assess the inter-rater reliability of 187 items related to walkability and physical disorder on a national sample of 150 street segments in the United States. We find that many items are reliably measured across auditors using CANVAS and that agreement between auditors appears to be uncorrelated with neighborhood demographic characteristics. Based on our results we conclude that Google Street View and CANVAS offer opportunities to develop greater comparability across neighborhood audit studies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology and Center on Health, Risk and Society, American University, Washington, DC, United States. Electronic address: bader@american.edu.
authors.forename: Michael D M
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Bader
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.
authors.forename: Stephen J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Mooney
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology and Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
authors.forename: Yeon Jin
authors.initials: YJ
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sheehan
authors.affiliation: Columbia Population Research Center, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.
authors.forename: Kathryn M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Neckerman
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.
authors.forename: Andrew G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Rundle
authors.affiliation: School of Social Work, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.
authors.forename: Julien O
authors.initials: JO
authors.lastname: Teitler
mesh_terms: D004779:Environment Design; D040362:Geographic Information Systems / Q000295:instrumentation*; D006801:Humans; D009519:New York City; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012111:Residence Characteristics
keywords: Disorder; Google Street View; Neighborhood audit; Systematic social observation; Walkability