Perceptions of One's Neighborhood and Mammogram Use among a Sample of Low-Income Women at Risk for Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Sexually Transmitted Infections

Mothers with justice-involved sons: Socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 by neighborhood disorder in the United States

Women, particularly mothers, have faced disparate socioeconomic consequences throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Research has yet to examine whether the consequences of the pandemic vary based on the level of neighborhood disorder, which is associated with various health conditions, including COVID-19 complications. The present study utilizes data from a diverse sample of 221 women with justice-involved sons interviewed during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Negative binominal and logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine whether perceived neighborhood social disorder is related to socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether the relation varies for mothers with and without children in their home during the pandemic. The results suggest that greater perceived neighborhood social disorder was associated with increased in COVID-19-related socioeconomic consequences. Neighborhood social disorder affected socioeconomic impacts above and beyond the effects of having a child living in the home. Additionally, Latinas experienced greater socioeconomic impacts than women of other races and ethnicities. The results indicate a key relationship between the neighborhood conditions a woman lives in and the extent of the socioeconomic consequences they faced during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Future directions and direct implications of the study findings are discussed.

Psychological and neighborhood factors associated with urban women's preventive care use

Women are more likely than men to forego care-including preventive care. Understanding which factors influence women's preventive care use has the potential to improve health. This study focuses on the largely understudied areas of psychological barriers (depression) and neighborhood factors (support and stressors) that may be associated with women's preventive care use through secondary analysis of the Chicago Community Adult Health Study. Across models, 30-40% of the variance in preventive care adherence was explained by the neighborhood. Depressive symptoms were not associated with preventive care use when neighborhood factors were included. However, stratified models showed that associations varied by race/ethnicity. Previous research has tended to focus on individual determinants of care, but this study suggests that barriers to care are far more complex. Efforts aimed at improving care utilization need to be multipronged and interventions need to take an individual's demographics, mental health, and context into account.

Broken (windows) theory: A meta-analysis of the evidence for the pathways from neighborhood disorder to resident health outcomes and behaviors

The criminological "broken windows" theory (BWT) has inspired public health researchers to test the impact of neighborhood disorder on an array of resident health behaviors and outcomes. This paper identifies and meta-analyzes the evidence for three mechanisms (pathways) by which neighborhood disorder is argued to impact health, accounting for methodological inconsistencies across studies. A search identified 198 studies (152 with sufficient data for meta-analysis) testing any of the three pathways or downstream, general health outcomes. The meta-analysis found that perceived disorder was consistently associated with mental health outcomes, as well as substance abuse, and measures of overall health. This supported the psychosocial model of disadvantage, in which stressful contexts impact mental health and related sequelae. There was no consistent evidence for disorder's impact on physical health or risky behavior. Further examination revealed that support for BWT-related hypotheses has been overstated owing to data censoring and the failure to consistently include critical covariates, like socioeconomic status and collective efficacy. Even where there is evidence that BWT impacts outcomes, it is driven by studies that measured disorder as the perceptions of the focal individual, potentially conflating pessimism about the neighborhood with mental health.