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In this video, Grace Noppert, Research Assistant Professor in ISR’s Survey Research Center, explores the ways that neighborhood factors may impact your risk of respiratory illnesses.

“I think a lot about neighborhoods and what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood. With my work, I think about how neighborhoods may affect your risk of different respiratory illnesses. I specifically focus a lot on rural neighborhoods. 

The one thing that has been really surprising in our work is just how unique rural areas can be. Some of those rural areas are really thriving, but others are falling behind and are getting left behind in a lot of ways. Their economic infrastructure is failing and they don’t have good health care. It takes a long time to get to a good grocery store or access services. Those are the areas that I’m also looking to because they’re often really vulnerable to respiratory outbreaks. We saw this during COVID, those neighborhoods got hit really hard, lost a lot of their population and a lot of their businesses. 

It’s been so shocking to just see how different rural areas look across the U.S. I come from a poor rural area in Indiana, and my family is still there. That’s still where I call home. So it’s really important to me that we pay attention to what’s going on in those rural areas because there’s something so beautiful about that. I think so often it gets forgotten in research, but I’m really trying to shed a light on that.”