Ned English
NORC at the University of Chicago, Chicago
Ned English is a Senior Survey Methodoligist at NORC at the University of Chicago, where he has been since 2002. His expertise lies in the interface between GIS (geographic information systems) and survey methodology, and so has been involved in research including address-based sampling (ABS), targeting rare populations, and the implimentation of the USPS delivery-sequence file (DSF) over the past ten years. Ned has a Master's degree in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Bachelor's degree in Geography from McGill University.
Linking Extant Social and Environmental Data at Multiple Scales to Surveys: Activity Space
Kevin Brown
NORC at the University of Chicago
Kate Cagney
NORC at the University of Chicago
Charlie Catlett
Argonne National Laboratory
Ned English
NORC at the University of Chicago, Chicago
Chang Zhao
NORC at the University of Chicago
The goal of the Activity Space research program has been to understand the social and spatial environments of older adults' lives and their influence on health outcomes. We do so by quantifying "activity spaces", that is where they conduct their daily routines, with respect to environmental and social influences. In so doing our study has conducted a household survey and used smartphone technology to capture GPS location and administer Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMAs) that consider physical location, social network interaction, and momentary health at multiple time points for approximately 400 baseline respondents in Chicago, IL. Moreover, we have used geographic information systems (GIS) to link respondent location information with individual-level sociodemographic data sets as well as those from the "Array of Things" project to characterize physical and social environments. Array of Things (https://arrayofthings.github.io/) is an urban sensing network that has been collecting real-time environmental and activity data in cities including Chicago. We then examined the association between environmental exposure and individual health outcomes using our compiled data.