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Chicago residents’ perceptions of air quality: objective pollution, the built environment, and neighborhood stigma theory

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Abstract

Substantial research documents higher pollution levels in minority neighborhoods, but little research evaluates how residents perceive their own communities’ pollution risks. According to “neighborhood stigma” theory, survey respondents share a cultural bias that minorities cause social dysfunction, leading to over-reports of dysfunction in minority communities. This study investigates perceptions of residential outdoor air quality by linking objective data on built and social environments with multiple measures of pollution and a representative survey of Chicago residents. Consistent with the scholarly narrative, results show that air quality is rated worse where minorities and poverty are concentrated, even after extensive adjustment for objective pollution and built environment measures. Perceptions of air pollution may thus be driven by neighborhood socioeconomic position far more than by respondents’ ability to perceive pollution. The finding that 63.5 % of the sample reported excellent or good air quality helps to explain current challenging in promoting environmental action.

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Notes

  1. The aggregated measures are constructed using HLM software, version 6, and are the neighborhood level residuals when controlling for the standard demographic variables used in model 1, using empirical Bayes estimation (Mujahid et al. 2007).

  2. The intraclass correlation for ordinal logit models is calculated as τ/(τ + 3.29), where τ is the variance of the random intercepts (Skrondal and Rabe-Hesketh 2004).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the EPA and in part by the Michigan Center for Integrative Approaches to Health Disparities (P60MD002249) funded by the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. The author gratefully acknowledges use of the services and facilities of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, funded by NICHD Center Grant R24 HD041028. This work does not represent the official policies of the Environmental Protection Agency.

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  1. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 104 Mason Farm Road, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

    Katherine E. King

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  1. Katherine E. King
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King, K.E. Chicago residents’ perceptions of air quality: objective pollution, the built environment, and neighborhood stigma theory. Popul Environ 37, 1–21 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-014-0228-x

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