Abstract
The neighborhood effect averaging problem (NEAP) was discovered in 2018. It arises when human mobility is ignored when assessing individual exposures to environmental factors (e.g., noise and air pollution). Neighborhood effect averaging occurs because most people move around in their daily life, and as a result, their mobility-based exposures would tend toward the average of the population or participants of the study area. Assessments of individual exposures or their health impacts based only on residential neighborhoods do no capture people’s exposures in non-residential neighborhoods and thus may lead to erroneous findings (because people’s daily mobility may amplify or attenuate the exposures they experienced in their residential neighborhoods). To date, there has been limited research on the NEAP and its effects on research findings. This chapter provides a succinct overview of the NEAP and relevant recent studies on the problem. It also highlights the need to mitigate the NEAP in research and its policy implications, especially concerning the situations of socially disadvantaged groups.
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Kwan, MP. (2022). Human Mobility and the Neighborhood Effect Averaging Problem (NEAP). In: Li, B., Shi, X., Zhu, AX., Wang, C., Lin, H. (eds) New Thinking in GIScience. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3816-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3816-0_11
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