Physical Spacing and Social Interaction Before the Global Pandemic

Subsequent to the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 and emergence of COVID-19, policy to limit the further spread has focused on increasing distance between individuals when interacting, often termed social distancing although physical distancing is more accurate (Das Gupta and Wong in Canadian J Public Health 111:488–489, 2020; Gale in Is ‘social distancing’ the wrong term? Expert prefers ‘physical distancing,’ and the WHO agrees. The Washington Post, 2020; Sørensen et al. in Glob Health Promot, 28:5–14, 2021), and limiting the frequency of interaction by limiting/prohibiting non-essential and large-scale social gatherings. This research note focuses on social spacing, defined by distance and interaction, to offer a cross-cultural insight into social distancing and social interactions in the pre-pandemic period. Combining unique data on frequency of contact, religious service attendance and preferred interpersonal spacing in 20 countries, this research note considers variation in the extent to which physical distance was already practiced without official recommendations and underscores notable cross-cultural variation in the extent to which social interaction occurred. Results suggest that policy intervention should emphasize certain behavioral changes based on pre-existing context-specific patterns of interaction and interpersonal spacing rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. This research note is a descriptive first step that allows unique insight into social spacing and contact prior to the spread of SARS-CoV-2. It provides a baseline typology and a reference for future work on the cross-cultural implications of COVID-19 for pre-pandemic socio-cultural practice and vice versa.

Decomposing County-Level Working-Age Mortality Trends in the United States Between 1999–2001 and 2015–2017

Studies have documented significant geographic divergence in U.S. mortality in recent decades. However, few studies have examined the extent to which county-level trends in mortality can be explained by national, state, and metropolitan-level trends, and which county-specific factors contribute to remaining variation. Combining vital statistics data on deaths and Census data with time-varying county-level contextual characteristics, we use a spatially explicit Bayesian hierarchical model to analyze the associations between working-age mortality, state, metropolitan status and county-level socioeconomic conditions, family characteristics, labor market conditions, health behaviors, and population characteristics between 2000 and 2017. Additionally, we employ a Shapley decomposition to illustrate the additive contributions of each changing county-level characteristic to the observed mortality change in U.S. counties between 1999–2001 and 2015–2017 over and above national, state, and metropolitan–nonmetropolitan mortality trends. Mortality trends varied by state and metropolitan status as did the contribution of county-level characteristics. Metropolitan status predicted more of the county-level variance in mortality than state of residence. Of the county-level characteristics, changes in percent college-graduates, smoking prevalence and the percent of foreign-born population contributed to a decline in all-cause mortality over this period, whereas increasing levels of poverty, unemployment, and single-parent families and declines manufacturing employment slowed down these improvements, and in many nonmetropolitan areas were large enough to overpower the positive contributions of the protective factors.

Spatial Variation in Contraceptive Practice Across the Districts of India, 1998–2016

India is currently one of the most demographically diverse regions of the world. Fertility and mortality rates are known to show considerable variation at the level of regions, states and districts. Little is known however, about the spatial variations of the contraceptive usage—a critical variable that is relevant to fertility as well as health policy. This paper uses data from four national population-based household surveys conducted between 1998 and 2016 to explore district-level variations in the contraceptive prevalence rate. We find no clear evidence of convergence. The gap between the best and worst performing districts is more than 70 percent across the four rounds and does not diminish over time. We also find considerable evidence of spatial clustering across districts. Districts with high prevalence concentrate in Southern states and more recently, in the Northeast of the country. Our analysis suggests that female literacy and health care infrastructure are important correlates of spatial clusters. This suggests that investments in women’s human capital and health-care infrastructure play a role in expanding women’s opportunities to time their births.

The Spatial Structure and Local Experience of Residential Segregation

This study examines the extent to which road connectivity and physical barriers—such as highways, railroad tracks, and waterways—structure spatial patterns of racial and ethnic residential segregation and shape how segregation is locally experienced by residents. Our focus is on physical barriers that are also social boundaries—features of the built environment that reduce physical connectivity and mark a social boundary between geographic areas. We measure residential segregation with attention to the proximity and road connectivity between locations, which allows us to identify areas where physical barriers mark a social boundary between geographic areas with different racial and ethnic compositions. Our approach integrates ethnographic observation of three such areas in Houston, Texas, to investigate residents' perceptions and local experience of social and spatial division. The results reveal that physical barriers are associated with heightened levels of ethnoracial segregation, and residents experience the barriers as symbolic markers of perceived distinctions between groups and physical impediments to social connection. Although barriers like highways, railroad tracks, and bayous are not inherently harbingers of ethnoracial segregation, our study demonstrates that physical barriers can provide the infrastructure for social boundaries and facilitate durable neighborhood racial divisions.