Projects

The National Neighborhood Data Archive (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 that can be readily linked to existing survey data, cohort studies, or electronic medical records. 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.

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 & affluence, Public transit, Walkability, Crime, Land use, Housing, Recreational centers, libraries, Fast food, Climate, Health care, 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).

Credits and Contact
NaNDA is administered by the Social Environment and Health program at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Funding for NaNDA comes from the National Institute on Aging (RF1AG057540) and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (90RTHF0001).