Social and Preventive Medicine, Université de Montréal, CRCHUM, Montreal Public Health Departement, Montreal, QC, Canada H2L 1V1.
Health Place. 2013 May;21:86-93. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2013.01.005. Epub 2013 Feb 4.
A considerable body of literature has investigated how environmental exposures affect health through various pathways. These studies have generally adopted a common approach to define environmental exposures, focusing on the local residential environment, using census tracts or postcodes to delimit exposures. However, use of such administrative units may not be appropriate to evaluate contextual effets on health because they are generally not a 'true' representation of the environments to which individuals are exposed. Recent work has suggested that advances may be made if an activity-space approach is adopted. The present paper investigates how various disciplines may contribute to the refinement of the concept of activity space for use in health research. In particular we draw on seminal work in time geography, which provides a framework to describe individual behavior in space and time, and can help the conceptualization of activity space. In addition we review work in environmental psychology and social networks research, which provides insights on how people and places interact and offers new theories for improving the spatial definition of contextual exposures.
大量文献研究了环境暴露通过各种途径如何影响健康。这些研究通常采用一种常见的方法来定义环境暴露，即关注当地居住环境，使用普查区或邮政编码来划定暴露范围。然而，使用这种行政单位可能并不适合评估对健康的背景效应，因为它们通常不是个人所暴露的环境的“真实”代表。最近的工作表明，如果采用活动空间方法，可能会取得进展。本文探讨了各个学科如何为完善活动空间概念以用于健康研究做出贡献。特别是，我们借鉴了时间地理学的开创性工作，该工作提供了一个描述个体在空间和时间中的行为的框架，并有助于活动空间的概念化。此外，我们还回顾了环境心理学和社会网络研究的工作，这些研究提供了关于人和地点如何相互作用的见解，并为改进背景暴露的空间定义提供了新的理论。
