Route Choices and Adolescent–Adult Connections in Mitigating Exposure to Environmental Risk Factors During Daily Activities

Abstract

While adolescent–adult connections have been shown to be protective against violence perpetration and victimization, mechanisms through which these connections confer protection from violence are poorly understood. We assessed whether adolescent–adult connections protected youth in lower resource urban neighborhoods from exposure to environmental risk factors for violence during daily activities. We overlaid on the city landscape minute-by-minute activity paths from 274 randomly sampled predominantly African American male youth, ages 10 to 24, enrolled in a population-based study of daily activities in Philadelphia, PA, to calculate environmental exposures and to compare exposures along actual versus shortest potential travel routes. Adolescent–adult connections were defined using brief survey questions and detailed family genograms. Analyses demonstrated that youth’s selected travel routes resulted in significantly lower exposure to several types of crime, including vandalism, narcotics arrests, and disorderly conduct, than would have occurred on shortest potential routes. On average, youth with adolescent–adult connections spent less time outdoors than youth without connections, although these differences did not reach statistical significance (p = .06). There were no significant differences in environmental risk factors encountered by youth with versus without adolescent–adult connections. Future mixed-methods research combining qualitative and geographic information systems (GIS) approaches should investigate which factors shape travel decisions during daily activities to guide multimodal violence prevention interventions.