Constructing Archival Geospatial Datasets to Link Historical Structural Racism to Cognitive & Functional Decline
Richard Sadler, Danielle Beatty Moody, Ayla Novruz, Allie Akmal, Rachel Davis, Graham Mooney, Kevin Henry, Robert Belli

TL;DR
This paper describes creating geospatial datasets to study how historical structural racism affects cognitive and functional decline in aging adults.
Contribution
The novel contribution is the detailed methodology for constructing archival datasets linking historical structural racism to health outcomes.
Findings
The paper outlines processes for collecting built environment data from archives to study structural racism's impact.
Residential histories are collected to assign age- and period-specific environmental exposures in a longitudinal cohort.
The approach allows for spatial-temporal analysis of how historical policies affect cognitive decline.
Abstract
More accurately measuring lifecourse environmental exposures requires working with data not readily available from digitized sources. Here we detail the processes for scouring city archives to uncover aspects of structural racism in the built environment. In our initial non-human subjects work in Baltimore, we have built datasets on the built environment and prepared methods to collect residential histories, which together allow us to study impacts of residential exposures across the lifecourse for this longitudinal cohort of aging adults. We discuss the iterative process of archive visits—working with team members who are experts in this field—to obtain the full complement of features in the built environment driven by structurally racist policies (i.e. redlining, blockbusting, restrictive covenants, urban renewal, freeway construction, predatory lending). We then discuss how…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEnvironmental Justice and Health Disparities · Health, Environment, Cognitive Aging · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
