Journal
JOURNAL OF URBAN HEALTH-BULLETIN OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE
Volume 93, Issue 1, Pages 213-232Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s11524-015-9959-y
Keywords
Neighborhood socio-economic status; Neighborhood disadvantage; Neighborhood change; Confirmatory factor analysis; Measurement bias; Invariance
Funding
- NIA NIH HHS [R01 AG043960] Funding Source: Medline
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Contextual research on time and place requires a consistent measurement instrument for neighborhood conditions in order to make unbiased inferences about neighborhood change. We develop such a time-invariant measure of neighborhood socio-economic status (NSES) using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses fit to census data at the tract level from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Censuses and the 2008-2012 American Community Survey. A single factor model fit the data well at all three time periods, and factor loadings-but not indicator intercepts-could be constrained to equality over time without decrement to fit. After addressing remaining longitudinal measurement bias, we found that NSES increased from 1990 to 2000, and then-consistent with the timing of the BGreat Recession-declined in 2008-2012 to a level approaching that of 1990. Our approach for evaluating and adjusting for time-invariance is not only instructive for studies of NSES but also more generally for longitudinal studies in which the variable of interest is a latent construct.
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