Funded Research
Neighborhood, Food Environment, Diet and Health: Quasi-experimental Study
Source: NIH/NIEHS
Active: 09/01/2005 - 08/31/2010
Investigator(s):
Stephen Matthews
Steve Cummins (University of London)
Ana Diez Roux (University of Michigan), consultant
Reducing the population prevalence of obesity is a current major public
health goal. Interventions to reduce the prevalence of obesity have
generally focused on individual behavior and lifestyle but have met with
limited success. Strategies that focus on the role of the built
environment have been neglected. The purpose of this innovative pilot
study is to evaluate, using a quasi-experimental design, the impact on
diet and psychological health of a five-year $40 million state-government
funded program - The Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative - that
aims to improve the local built food retail environment in Philadelphia.
The project has four specific aims. 1) To describe and compare fruit and
vegetable consumption patterns and measures of psychological health in an
intervention neighborhood against a matched comparison neighborhood. 2) To
evaluate whether these patterns change after the opening of a new food
superstore (the intervention) in the intervention neighborhood compared to
a matched comparison site. 3) To explore impacts on defined subgroups of
residents based on income, education and baseline consumption status. 4)
To investigate changes in the retail economy in the intervention
neighborhood and compare these with the comparison neighborhood.
A telephone survey of residents of two Philadelphia neighborhoods (one
intervention and one comparison) with an achieved sample size of four
hundred and sixty-six men and women aged 18+ in each neighborhood at
follow-up will be undertaken. At baseline, respondents will be contacted
with a pre-notification letter which will then be followed by a telephone
call designed to elicit responses to questions relating to diet, mental
health, perceptions of food access, food shopping behavior, transport and
a range of socio-demographic data. Respondents will then be followed-up at
eight months in order to assess the effect of the intervention. In
addition geographical information systems will be used to assess positive
and negative changes in the local food retail economy and relate them to
changes in physical access to food. Findings from the project will be used
to prepare a proposal to NIH for a larger mixed-method, multi-site
experimental study in a range of community settings (urban, small town,
rural) throughout the USA. Go to Project Website
