Documenting and Archiving the Adolescent Health and Development in Context Study

Ohio State University, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Project Summary This proposal will prepare documentation and data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study (AHDC) for dissemination to the scientific community. Despite the long history of studying the importance of residential neighborhoods for adolescent health and developmental outcomes, there are significant limitations to the current research on neighborhood and contextual effects. Extant research often only considers the Census tract or block group of residence in measuring exposure to neighborhood conditions due to a lack of available data, despite critiques that acknowledge the need for more precise data on spatial exposures in routine activity spaces. The AHDC study combines social survey, weeklong smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment and GPS tracking, detailed space-time budget data, and physiological biomarkers of stress from a representative sample of 1,400 adolescents and their caregivers in Franklin County, Ohio. This proposal's aims are to 1) create additional contextual variables and improved posthoc stratification weights; 2) create study and data documentation that meets Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standards which are international social science guidelines for survey codebooks and study metadata that facilitate data sharing; 3) create publicly available datasets that withhold geographic identifiers to protect respondent confidentiality but still allow for sophisticated analyses of multi-contextual effects on adolescent health and developmental outcomes; and 4) create a restricted access dataset that includes detailed geographic identifiers for precise geospatial analysis. We propose to submit these datasets to an established data repository such as the Data Sharing for Demographic Research (DSDR) housed at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), which handles both publicly available and restricted, sensitive geospatial data. Providing publicly available datasets will require close attention to the possibility of deductive disclosure of participant identity. However, public access is important as it will provide the widest access with the lowest costs for outside researchers in the scientific community to conduct rich, innovative research on the contextual influences on adolescent outcomes. Restricted access datasets will preserve confidentiality through the proposed use of a Virtual Data Enclave (VDE), whereby researchers access the data in a virtual environment from their home instruction. Using a VDE system removes the necessity of transferring data to individual researchers, which results in lower likelihood of intentional or unintentional disclosure. The AHDC is an innovative, complex study that will provide a significant step forward for contextual effects research by the wider scientific community, by including detailed measures of exposures to neighborhood and other contexts not previously included in large scale community-based research.