Validating Administrative Social Stressor Indicators Using Survey Data on Perceived Stress across New York City

Chronic psychological stress has been linked to respiratory health, both independently and in combination with air pollution. A biological stress response occurs when the demands of a stressor are perceived to overwhelm one’s capacity to manage those demands effectively. Because individual level measures of stress are often unavailable, administrative social stressor indicators (e.g., crime rates) are frequently used as a proxy; however, the extent to which such proxies accurately represent individual stress perceptions is not well understood. We used survey and geographic information system (GIS) methods to characterize relationships between individual stress perception and administrative social stressor indicators, to identify valid stressor indicators for population-level analysis. Our spatially-stratified, citywide survey (n = 1549) assessed a range of psychosocial domains, including neighborhood disorder, buffering resources, and mental health. We assigned publicly-available, areal-level stressor ind...