Compare methods

	Neighborhood Effects Analysis	Accessibility Analysis
Field	Urban Studies	Human Geography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2002	1959
Originator	Robert J. Sampson (and the Chicago neighbourhood-effects tradition)	Walter G. Hansen
Type	Pipeline for estimating the contextual/causal effect of neighbourhood on individual outcomes	Spatial index of the ease of reaching opportunities from a location
Seminal source	Sampson, R. J., Morenoff, J. D., & Gannon-Rowley, T. (2002). Assessing "neighborhood effects": Social processes and new directions in research. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 443–478.	Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76.
Aliases	Neighbourhood Effects Modelling, Contextual Effects Analysis, Multilevel Neighbourhood Analysis, Place Effects Estimation	Hansen Accessibility, Gravity Accessibility Measure, Potential Accessibility, Spatial Accessibility Index
Related	4	4
Summary	Neighborhood effects analysis estimates how much the place a person lives — its poverty, social cohesion, disorder, or institutions — shapes individual outcomes such as health, crime, educational attainment, and economic mobility, over and above the individual's own characteristics. It is dominated by multilevel (hierarchical) models that recognise people are nested within neighbourhoods, separating variation that lies between places from variation within them. The central methodological challenge, crystallised in Robert Sampson and colleagues' influential 2002 review, is distinguishing genuine contextual effects from selection bias: the fact that people do not sort into neighbourhoods at random.	Accessibility analysis measures how easily opportunities — jobs, shops, clinics, parks — can be reached from a given location, combining the attractiveness (size) of destinations with the cost of travelling to them. The gravity-based formulation introduced by Walter Hansen in 1959 sums the opportunities at all destinations, each discounted by a distance-decay function of travel cost, producing a single accessibility score per origin that has become a foundational concept in transport geography and urban planning.