Using Mobile Technology

Using Mobile Technology to Understand Activity Space Exposures and Youth Development: Preliminary Findings from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context (AHDC) Study

Presented by Christopher Browning, Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University

Description:

Using Mobile Technology to Understand Activity Space Exposures and Youth Development: Preliminary Findings from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context (AHDC) Study

Presented by Christopher Browning, Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University

Date: Wednesday, May 20
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location: 112 Social Ecology 1

(lunch provided)

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Research examining contextual influences on youth development and behavior has entered a new era of possibility. The availability of mobile technology for GPS tracking and real-time assessment has opened the door to collection of far more precise data on everyday sociospatial contexts. This presentation describes the Adolescent Health and Development in Context (AHDC) project – a large scale, longitudinal study of youth ages 11-17 in Franklin County, Ohio focused on the nature and developmental consequences of routine activity space exposures. In addition to the major research questions and theoretical approach motivating the study, I review key features of the study design: (1) Smartphone-based GPS tracking over the course of a week; (2) Smartphone-based Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) of location, activities, network partner presence, risk behaviors, and immediate social environments several times a day during the week; (3) follow-up interview-based collection of detailed space-time budget data on five of the seven days.  Preliminary results indicate that youth spend a substantial proportion of non-home time outside of their conventionally defined neighborhoods.  Moreover, exposure to potentially criminogenic activity spaces varies significantly between youth from the same neighborhood and across days of the week (within youth).  I conclude with a discussion of the implications of activity space approaches and new data collection technologies for research on communities and crime. 

Christopher R. Browning is a Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University.  His research interests include the causes and consequences of community social organization; the neighborhood context of crime, risk behavior, and health; the long-term effects of maltreatment during childhood; and multilevel statistical models. 

Please kindly RSVP by May 18th, by following this link:  http://cls.soceco.uci.edu/ChrisBrowningTalk