Operationalizing the Concept of Neighborhood: Application to Residential Location Choice Analysis

In this paper, we explore different conceptualizations to represent neighborhoods in residential location choice models, and describe three alternative ways for constructing operational units to represent neighborhoods. In particular, we examine the possibility of using the census units to represent the hierarchical fixed neighborhood definition, and the circular units and network bands to represent the hierarchical sliding neighborhood definition. Overall, the network band definition is conceptually appealing. It also is marginally superior to the other two operational representations from a model fit standpoint.