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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Susanna Visser, MS¹, Ruth Perou, PhD¹, Angelika H. Claussen, PhD¹, Michelle Gross, PhD², and Judy Howard, MD³. (1) Division of Human Development and Disability, National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, 1600 Clifton Road, MS E-88, Atlanta, GA 30333, 404-498-3557, bhv6@cdc.gov, (2) The Debbie School, University of Miami School of Medicine, P.O. Box 014621, Miami, FL 33101, (3) Department of Pediatrics, UCLA, 300 UCLA Medical Plaza, Suite 3300, Los Angeles, CA 90095

Recent research has highlighted the need to understand individual behavior within the context of a community. Measuring community factors is of particular importance when designing public health interventions involving behavioral change. This consideration led to the inclusion of neighborhood perception measures in the logic model of a multi-site community-based parenting project, Legacy for Children^TM. In the Legacy logic model, community resources, perception, and connectedness are seen as factors mediating the impact of parenting on child development. Survey questions relating to neighborhood perceptions were selected from previous community-based studies, none of which included extensive validation of individual constructs. Principal components analysis of the Legacy baseline assessment data (577 responding mothers from two multi-ethnic, low income sites) was used to identify reliable sub-domains of neighborhood perception. Oblique rotation revealed a six-factor solution after 4 of 42 items were dropped due to low communality estimates. The factors tracked into the following neighborhood sub-domains: neighborhood problems (α = .94), neighborhood cohesion (α = .66), neighboring behavior (α = .79), chances of a child's success (α = .82), neighborhood safety (α = .84), and community activism (α = .82). The identified sub-domains of neighborhood perception will be assessed for stability and reliability over time and will be subsequently used to test the mediating effect of the Legacy intervention on maternal-child interaction and resulting infant and child development. These factors may play a critical role in translating program effects outside of the research setting.

Learning Objectives:

• Articulate the potential impact of neighborhood perception on parenting behavior.
• Describe the relationship between community factors and child development, as hypothesized by the Legacy for ChildrenTM logic model.
• Describe the resulting factor structure of the Legacy for ChildrenTM neighborhood perception measures.

Keywords: Community-Based Public Health, Child Health

Related Web page: www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/child/legacy.htm

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No