View Research by Author - Claudia J. Coulton

Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/ClaudiaJCoulton

Americans change residences frequently. Residential mobility can reflect positive changes in a family's circumstances or be a symptom of instability and insecurity. Mobility may also change neighborhoods as a whole. To shed light on these challenges, this report uses a unique survey conducted for the Making Connections initiative. The first component measures how mobility contributed to changes in neighborhoods' composition and characteristics. The second component identifies groups of households that reflect different reasons for moving or staying in place. The final component introduces five stylized models of neighborhood performance: each has implications for low-income families' well-being and for community-change efforts.

The data used to craft neighborhood indicators often come from the records of administrative agencies. These are particularly useful for community indicators because they are timelier or can be applied to smaller areas than government surveys. This monograph describes 42 of these data sources. It begins with a brief section on recent developments in neighborhood indicators work, followed by a discussion of some of the challenges of using administrative records data for these purposes. The main body of the monograph is a catalog that describes the sources and gives examples of the types of indicators that can be constructed from each.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, this report summarizes a project conducted by the Urban Institute and five partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership—Cleveland, Denver, Indianapolis, Oakland and Providence. For the first component of the project, each site compiled and analyzed new neighborhood-level indicators pertaining to local health issues and used the data to further local health improvement initiatives. For the second component, researchers examined relationships across sites between neighborhood conditions and five key health indicators (teen birthrates, rates of early prenatal care, rates of low-birth-weight births, infant mortality rates, and age-adjusted mortality rates).

Return to list of authors