Neighborhood mobility and racial disparities in preterm birth: A sibling study in California

Recent work finds that upward neighborhood mobility—defined as reductions in neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage due to moving—may improve birth outcomes. Less work, however, explores whether changes in socioeconomic context differentially impact birth outcomes by maternal race and ethnicity. In the US, mothers of minoritized racial and ethnic identity often experience worse neighborhood conditions and pregnancy outcomes than White mothers. Using a sibling-linked dataset, we examined whether neighborhood mobility corresponds with changes in preterm birth risk among Asian (N = 130,079), Black (N = 50,149), Hispanic (N = 429,938), and White (N = 233,428) mothers who delivered multiple live births in California between 2005 and 2015. We linked residential addresses at each birth to census-derived indices of neighborhood disadvantage and defined levels of neighborhood mobility as moving-induced changes in disadvantage between pregnancies. We mapped neighborhood mobility patterns and fit conditional logistic regression models estimating the odds of preterm birth in the sibling delivered after moving, controlling for the risk of preterm birth in the sibling delivered before moving, by maternal race and ethnicity. Dot density maps highlight racialized patterns of neighborhood mobility and segregation between Black and White mothers. Regression results show that Black and, in some cases, Asian and Hispanic mothers who experienced upward mobility (moves away from neighborhood disadvantage) exhibited reduced odds of preterm birth in the second delivery. Upward mobility did not reduce the odds of preterm birth among White mothers. Findings suggest that policies and programs that enable opportunities for neighborhood mobility may reduce persistent racial and ethnic disparities in adverse birth outcomes.