Neighborhood physical disorder

Four items of the neighborhood physical disorder scale asses the respondent’s perceived level of physical disorder in the neighborhood using a seven-point Likert scale. An item example is People would be afraid to walk alone in this area after dark. The scores on each item were then summed together. We reversed coded the variable so that the higher scores reflect higher perceived neighborhood physical disorder (range 4–28). Cronbach’s α for this scale ranges from 0.75 to 0.85. The neighborhood social capital and physical disorder scales have been previously validated resulting in good psychometric properties (Stafford et al. 2003; Mendes de Leon et al. 2009).