Perceived Community Resource Availability Among Individuals with Psychiatric Disabilities

Integrating individuals with psychiatric disabilities (PD) in the community has long been a goal of mental health policymakers. One of the key determinants of community integration is greater participation in community organizations, and utilization of community amenities. In this study, we present a measure of Perceived Community Resource Availability developed at the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Community Participation at the University of Pennsylvania. For a set of 47 community resource types, ranging from recreational facilities to cultural organizations to personal services, the measure asks respondents to indicate whether they have the resource within walking distance of their homes, the importance of having that resource within walking distance, and, depending on whether or not they have the resource near their homes, how often they use/would use it. The measure was administered to 240 individuals with PD residing in Philadelphia. In addition to presenting descriptive results, we will identify the ten different resource/amenity types deemed as most important to individuals with PD. We will use a variety of public and private databases to obtain all the resource locations in Philadelphia for each of the top ten resource types. The kernel density tool in the ArcGIS software will be employed to create a resource availability index map of the city; that is, for every location in Philadelphia, the density (availability) of the most important resources will be determined. We will compare this resource availability map to the distribution of Philadelphia residents with PD and discuss the implications of these findings.