Three New Papers from T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow Nishita Dsouza

Development and validation of statewide survey-based measures of livability in Connecticut

Read the paper

In this paper, a factor analysis of livability-related survey items in the DataHaven Community Wellbeing Survey identifies 3 salient domains: safety, opportunity, and infrastructure. We combined these livability-related survey items into composite measures estimating people’s perceptions of where they live. We found that these measures are robust, with high reliability (e.g., internal consistency), in addition to high convergent validity with other area-level measures (e.g., racial residential segregation, area deprivation).

First author Nishita Dsouza said, “Livability is being increasingly measured as its popularity as a public policy goal rises. This study represents an opportunity to measure livability through combination of place-based survey items, an approach that can be replicated to create high-quality, robust measures to foster cross-sector collaboration.” Within the paper, this emphasized through saying that "[Creating] livability indicators at differing levels of geography is essential to the policy-making process by encouraging decision-makers to adopt a 'health in all policies approach' to examine upstream causes, think critically about systems change... and work across [sectors]."