O'Campo P, Aronson R, Johnson T. Economic, physical, and political characteristics of neighborhood of residence and risk of low birth weight, Working Paper WP-96-08. Baltimore, MD: Hopkins Population Center; 1996.
The authors investigate two questions: 1) whether neighborhood factors directly and indirectly influence the risk of low birthweight (LBW); and 2) whether neighborhood factors moderate the relation between individual-level risk factors and LBW. The authors concluded that high crime, low neighborhood wealth, and low levels of neighborhood political organization are direct neighborhood-level LBW determinants. They present a theoretically based framework that describes the mechanisms by which neighborhoods may lead to adverse health outcomes through the association of race and neighborhood wealth rather than neighborhood income. They note that interactions and confounding between individual-level and neighborhood-level characteristics in this study posed a problem. Using multilevel analyses to control for neighborhood levels of wealth, the authors found that the twofold gap between African American and white LBW was no longer significant.
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