Neighborhood Tax Foreclosures, Educational Attainment, and Preterm Birth among Urban African American Women

Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson and Dawn P. Misra
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Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson: College of Public Health, Division of Epidemiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
Dawn P. Misra: Department of Family Medicine and Public Health Sciences, Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, MI 48202, USA

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 6, 1-13

Abstract: Ecological evidence suggests that neighborhoods with more tax foreclosures also have more adverse birth outcomes. However, whether neighborhood-level tax foreclosures impact individual-level risk for adverse birth outcomes is unknown. We assessed whether living in a neighborhood with high tax foreclosures is associated with a woman’s preterm birth (PTB) risk and tested for effect modification by educational attainment, among urban African American women from the Life Influence on Fetal Environments Study (2009–2011; n = 686). We linked survey and medical record data to archival, block-group level tax foreclosure data from the county treasurer. We used Modified Poisson regression with robust error variance and included a foreclosure X education interaction in adjusted models. In the overall sample, neighborhood tax foreclosures did not predict PTB (adjusted relative risk: 0.93, CI: 0.74, 1.16), but the association was modified by educational attainment (interaction p = 0.01). Among women with lower education ( n = 227), neighborhood tax foreclosures did not predict PTB risk. The association for women with higher education ( n = 401) was statistically significant for a reduction in risk for PTB (adjusted relative risk: 0.74, CI: 0.55, 0.98) among those who lived in neighborhoods with high versus low tax foreclosures. Future studies should seek to identify the mechanisms of this association.

Keywords: preterm birth; neighborhood effects; tax foreclosures; urban decline; African American women; segregation; educational attainment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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