| Description: |
Background: Mobility decline is significantly associated with poor health outcomes and high health care costs, and impacts one third to one half of community-dwelling older adults. The built environment and neighborhood walkability play a major role in mobility and other health outcomes, and are of major interest in public health research. While many methods for assessing the built environment exist, the introduction of free, online, street-level images has made conducting virtual neighborhood audits a possibility. Previous studies have assessed the inter-rater reliability between virtual audits and field audits, and between multiple auditors conducting virtual audits with current imagery, but studies have not yet assessed the inter-rater reliability of audits conducted using archived Google Street View imagery. Methods: Two raters independently conducted 50 neighborhood audits for a subset of participants in the Health, Aging, and Body Composition Study using a modified version of the Active Neighborhood Checklist and the earliest available archived Google Street View imagery. The 77 items of the Checklist were dichotomized, and the prevalence-adjusted bias-adjusted kappa (PABAK) and percent agreement were calculated. Results: The PABAK values for the 77 items of the modified Active Neighborhood Checklist ranged from 0.20 to 1.00 with an average of 0.75. Eighty percent of items demonstrated substantial (PABAK ≥ 0.61) or nearly perfect agreement (PABAK ≥ 0.81). Conclusion: Google Street View images provide an efficient, convenient, and safe way to conduct neighborhood audits to measure the built environment. Archived imagery can be used to assess past neighborhood characteristics, allowing for historic data about the built environment to be added to existing cohorts. With the important role of the built environment in health outcomes such as mobility, the ability to assess past neighborhood characteristics with Google Street View imagery has the potential to improve public health research and examination of ... |