Ansolabehere Stephen, Brown Jacob R, Enos Ryan D, Shair Ben, Simko Tyler, Sutton David
Harvard University, Department of Government, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
Boston University, Department of Political Science, Boston, MA, 02215, USA.
Sci Data. 2025 Jun 19;12(1):1031. doi: 10.1038/s41597-025-05329-6.
Neighborhoods are frequently cited as impactful for social, economic, political, and health outcomes. Measuring neighborhoods, however, is challenging, as the definition of a neighborhood may change dramatically across places. Researchers lack widespread but locally-sourced data on neighborhoods, and instead often adopt widely available but arbitrary Census geographies as neighborhood proxies. Others invest in the collection of more precise definitions, but these types of data are hard to collect at scale. We address this tension between scale and precision by collecting, cleaning, and providing to researchers a new dataset of city-defined neighborhoods. Our data includes 206 of the largest cities in the United States, covering more than 77 million people. We combine these data with block-level Census demographic data and provide them along with open-source software to aid researchers in their use.
社区常常被认为对社会、经济、政治和健康结果具有重大影响。然而，衡量社区具有挑战性，因为社区的定义在不同地方可能会有很大变化。研究人员缺乏广泛但来自本地的社区数据，而是常常采用广泛可用但随意的人口普查地理区域作为社区的替代指标。其他人则投入精力收集更精确的定义，但这类数据难以大规模收集。我们通过收集、清理并向研究人员提供一个由城市定义的社区新数据集来解决规模与精度之间的这种矛盾。我们的数据包括美国206个最大的城市，覆盖超过7700万人。我们将这些数据与街区层面的人口普查人口统计数据相结合，并连同开源软件一起提供，以帮助研究人员使用。
