Construction of an environmental quality index for public health research

Environmental Health

Research

Kristen M Rappazzo¹  Danelle T Lobdell²  Jyotsna S Jagai³  Lynne C Messer⁴ 

[1] Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA;Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, National Center for Environmental Assessment, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, Oak Ridge, NC, USA;National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Chapel Hill, NC, USA;National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Chapel Hill, NC, USA;School of Public Health, Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Illinois, Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA;School of Community Health; College of Urban and Public Affairs, Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA;

关键词: Environmental quality;    Air quality;    Water quality;    Land quality;    Built environment;    Sociodemographic;    Rural–urban status;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1476-069X-13-39

 received in 2013-12-30, accepted in 2014-05-01,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundA more comprehensive estimate of environmental quality would improve our understanding of the relationship between environmental conditions and human health. An environmental quality index (EQI) for all counties in the U.S. was developed.MethodsThe EQI was developed in four parts: domain identification; data source acquisition; variable construction; and data reduction. Five environmental domains (air, water, land, built and sociodemographic) were recognized. Within each domain, data sources were identified; each was temporally (years 2000–2005) and geographically (county) restricted. Variables were constructed for each domain and assessed for missingness, collinearity, and normality. Domain-specific data reduction was accomplished using principal components analysis (PCA), resulting in domain-specific indices. Domain-specific indices were then combined into an overall EQI using PCA. In each PCA procedure, the first principal component was retained. Both domain-specific indices and overall EQI were stratified by four rural–urban continuum codes (RUCC). Higher values for each index were set to correspond to areas with poorer environmental quality.ResultsConcentrations of included variables differed across rural–urban strata, as did within-domain variable loadings, and domain index loadings for the EQI. In general, higher values of the air and sociodemographic indices were found in the more metropolitan areas and the most thinly populated areas have the lowest values of each of the domain indices. The less-urbanized counties (RUCC 3) demonstrated the greatest heterogeneity and range of EQI scores (−4.76, 3.57) while the thinly populated strata (RUCC 4) contained counties with the most positive scores (EQI score ranges from −5.86, 2.52).ConclusionThe EQI holds promise for improving our characterization of the overall environment for public health. The EQI describes the non-residential ambient county-level conditions to which residents are exposed and domain-specific EQI loadings indicate which of the environmental domains account for the largest portion of the variability in the EQI environment. The EQI was constructed for all counties in the United States, incorporating a variety of data to provide a broad picture of environmental conditions. We undertook a reproducible approach that primarily utilized publically-available data sources.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Messer et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.