Departments of Geography and Demography, And the Social Science Research Institute, Pennsylvania State University, 302 Walker Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA.
TSET Health Promotion Research Center, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, 655 Research Parkway, OK, 73104, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2021 Dec;291:114460. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114460. Epub 2021 Oct 8.
The tobacco retail environment is where most advertising dollars are spent. However, most research on the retail environment has not methodologically situated tobacco retailers as part of a larger community, and few studies have incorporated community member perspectives of their own tobacco use in relation to their local environments. The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate a multilevel, multimodal, mixed methods approach for understanding tobacco use in context. We combine quantitative data collected from tobacco retailer audits and geographically-explicit interviews with neighborhood residents to tell a more complete story of tobacco use behavior among adults in San Francisco's Marina district, and the Oakland Coliseum neighborhood in Alameda County, California. We find that while area-level and retail data provide a broad snapshot of two distinct communities with respect to sociodemographic characteristics and tobacco availability, interviews with community residents who use tobacco add important perspectives regarding how tobacco retailers are viewed and how residents interact with their neighborhood landscapes on a daily basis. The method we describe and critique has the potential to be scaled to incorporate a broader set of geographies, or tailored to address a multitude of health-related questions. Our approach further demonstrates the utility of including geolocated participant narratives as a means of understanding where researcher interpretations of urban environments diverge from those of community residents.
烟草零售环境是大部分广告资金的投放地。然而，大多数关于零售环境的研究并没有从方法论上将烟草零售商定位为更大社区的一部分，并且很少有研究将社区成员对自己的烟草使用与他们当地环境的看法纳入其中。本研究的目的是描述和评估一种多层次、多模式、混合方法的方法，用于理解背景下的烟草使用情况。我们结合了从烟草零售商审计和具有地理明确性的邻里居民访谈中收集的定量数据，以更全面地讲述加利福尼亚州旧金山马里纳区和奥克兰奥克兰体育馆社区成年人烟草使用行为的故事。我们发现，虽然区域和零售数据提供了两个不同社区在社会人口特征和烟草供应方面的广泛概况，但与使用烟草的社区居民进行的访谈增加了有关烟草零售商如何被看待以及居民如何每天与邻里景观互动的重要观点。我们描述和批评的方法有可能扩展到包含更广泛的地理范围，或专门针对解决多种与健康相关的问题。我们的方法进一步展示了将地理位置参与者叙述纳入理解研究人员对城市环境的解释与社区居民的解释有何不同的方法的实用性。
