Increasingly, researchers and policymakers are designing place typologies to understand distributions of place characteristics that influence population health and to inform policy response options. This growth is fueled in part by expanded access to small area data and the availability of new statistical approaches. By identifying how sociodemographic, economic, and population characteristics align across places, typologies can elucidate patterns in what can otherwise be highly complex matrices of disparate data. Typologies thus serve an important descriptive function that enables policymakers in different places to have a common understanding of issues at stake. Characterizing how patterns and trends are associated with improved or worsened health outcomes may also serve to inform policy change opportunities to support improvements in population health, by either spotlighting trends or learning from outliers. At the same time, many users also identify limitations in the use of typologies for prediction purposes.
In this episode, speakers will present recent empirical work or works-in-progress to categorize cities or other places into typologies based on essential socioeconomic, population and other characteristics. Speakers will discuss uses and limitations of typologies as tools to inform policy, as well as efforts to assess associations with health and health disparity outcomes.
Session Chairs: Lorna Thorpe and Dante Chinni
Presenters: Justin Feldman, Usama Bilal, Ari Pinkus
Podcast: Play in new window | Download