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For instance, Inagami et al. ( 2007 ) found that for subjects in a Los Angeles survey,
greater exposure to less disadvantaged non-residential neighborhoods where sub-
jects worked, shopped, and undertook other daily activities is associated with better
self-rated health. Kwan et al. ( 2012b ) observed that neighborhood effects based
on people's residential neighborhoods tend to overestimate their actual exposure to
social disadvantage for certain gender and racial groups. Both studies highlights the
fact that characteristics of the non-residential neighborhoods people visit in their
everyday lives may mitigate (or in other cases, exacerbate) the disadvantage they
experience in their residential neighborhood. More importantly, Wiehe et al. ( 2013 )
observed using GPS data that contextual influences on adolescents' health behaviors
vary by time of day, within participants' residential neighborhoods at the micro-
geographic level (e.g., spending time on the front porch, street corners, or other
places without adult supervision), and at various distances from home (e.g., area
immediately surrounding the home versus areas farther away from home but are
normally considered part of their residential neighborhood). Findings from these
study clearly indicate that accurate assessment of people's exposure to contextual
or environmental influences needs to be based on dynamic notions of context that
take both time and human mobility into account (Kwan 2012a , b ).
4.4
Accessibility: From Locational Proximity
to Space-Time Feasibility
Accessibility is a widely used analytical construct in geography, urban studies,
and transportation research. It helps us understand how the built environment
and individual attributes affect people's access to social opportunities important
to their quality of life and well-being, including jobs, social services, and health
care facilities (e.g., Weber 2003 ; Horner 2004 ;Parks 2004 ; Casas 2007 ;Wang
et al. 2010 ; Hawthorne and Kwan 2012 ; Shi et al. 2012 ;Wang 2012 ; Weber
and Sultana 2013 ). However, most empirical studies to date tend to conceptualize
accessibility mainly in terms of locational proximity or some closely related
derivatives such as gravity-based measures. In these conceptualizations, distances
or travel costs between facilities and the people they serve play an important
role in determining accessibility. Although conventional accessibility measures are
valuable as indicators of the relative distribution of people and the facilities that
serve them (place accessibility), their ignorance of time and human mobility poses
several difficulties for understanding people's experiences of access (Kwan and
We b e r 2003 ). For instance, these measures do not take into account people's need
to be at certain locations at certain times of the day (e.g., chauffeuring children to
or from schools and childcare providers), the amount of time they have for reaching
activity locations and undertaking activities there, and facility opening hours that
may render many facilities temporally unavailable and thus inaccessible (Weber and
Kwan 2002 , 2008 ;Schwanen 2007 ; Neutens et al. 2010 ; Delafontaine et al. 2011 ).
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