National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA) Launches
A project led by IDEAL RRTC co-investigator Philippa Clarke, Ph.D. makes national neighborhood datasets open and available for public use, through the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).
The National Neighborhood Data Archive, or NaNDA, is a publicly available data archive containing contextual measures for locations across the United States. NaNDA offers theoretically derived, spatially referenced, nationwide measures of the physical and social environment.
Each NaNDA dataset represents a set of measures on a single topic of interest. Examples of topics to be found in NaNDA (now or in the future) include socioeconomic disadvantage and affluence, walkability, crime, land use, recreational centers, libraries, fast food, climate, healthcare, housing, public transit, and more. Measures are available at multiple levels of spatial scale, from county to census tract to block group. New measures and spatial scales are added regularly.
Who should use NaNDA?
Anyone with research questions that address “place” – researchers, students, clinicians, policy makers, public health departments, and community organizations, among others – can download NaNDA contextual measures and link them with other data sources (such as survey data, cohort studies, electronic medical records, or other microdata).
More about the project
The project’s mission is to augment the scientific power of existing data, cohort and clinical studies by making available contextual characteristics that can be easily linked to understand the multilevel factors shaping population health.
The project is led by our team of highly-experienced researchers in the U-M Institute for Social Research's Social Environment and Health Program. Their team, led by IDEAL RRTC co-investigator Philippa Clarke, PhD., holds exceptional expertise in large-scale contextual data creation, integration, and dissemination. This project will augment the scientific power of existing data, cohort and clinical studies by making available innovative, theoretically meaningful, spatially-referenced contextual characteristics that can be easily linked to understand the multilevel factors shaping population health and healthy aging. Clarke is professor of epidemiology at the U-M School of Public Health and research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research. NaNDA is administered by the Social Environment and Health program at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR). Funding for NaNDA comes from the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research as part of the IDEAL RRTC.
Project URL: https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/nanda
Questions or comments about NaNDA? Contact the NaNDA Data Manager Megan Chenoweth at mmchenow@umich.edu and the project director Philippa Clarke, Ph.D., at pjclarke@umich.edu.