FOCUS
Patrice Williams’ general research interest encompasses how physical and social environments influence health outcomes with a more specific focus on how the built environment and ecologically-sensitive land use practices affect individual and community-level health outcomes of low-income populations and communities of color.
MORE ABOUT PATRICE
Patrice Williams is a third-year doctoral student and her overall research experiences have included studying the influence of structural and social determinants on disparities in health outcomes, as well as the use of biophysical techniques, mathematical modeling, and geospatial analyses to better understand the relationship between various factors that contribute to health outcomes. The driving force behind Patrice’s research interests is to increase agency through research and evidence-based health policies that acknowledge and dismantle social and structural barriers that create inequities.
DISSERTATION GRANT AWARDEE — SEPTEMBER 2018
“They Over-Promised and Under-Delivered”: A Mixed Methods Study on the Effects of Residential Displacement Pressure on Black Residents in Southwest Atlanta
The project aim is to understand the relationships between neighborhoods exposed and unexposed to greenspace redevelopment, social environmental stressors associated with residential displacement, and sleep quality among Black adults. The Atlanta Beltline, a public-private greenspace redevelopment project that will result in improvements to 700 acres of existing parks, the addition of 1,300 acres of new and expanded greenspace, and 33 miles of new multi-use trails, will be used as my case study. To achieve the project aim, the following phases will be enacted: Phase 1, use a structural racism lens to develop a displacement risk index to identify census block groups within the target development area of the Atlanta BeltLine that have a concentration of residents who are most susceptible to the pressure of displacement; Phase 2, pair exposed block groups (i.e., characterized as high risk of displacement) to unexposed block groups using propensity score matching; Phase 3, employ a survey to eligible households within exposed and unexposed block groups that asked questions pertaining to social environmental stressors (i.e., everyday discrimination, heightened vigilance, housing unaffordability, and financial strain), subjective sleep quality, and sociodemographic covariates; Phase 4, collect objective and subjective sleep data for seven days using wrist actigraphy and sleep diaries from a subset of participants; Phase 5, conduct semi-structured interviews with a subset of participants who completed the sleep study; and Phase 6, perform linear regression models for quantiative data and direct and conventional content analysis for qualitative data.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE HPRS DISSERTATION AWARDS, CLICK HERE.
