The Participatory Neighborhood Observation Grid: Multiple Case Study of Public Housing Tenants Evaluating their Residential Environment

The residential environment, including its factual and perceived characteristics, plays an important role in influencing the health and the well-being of residents. Although objective assessment of residential environment has been operationalized through a wide range of tools, few instruments including residents’ perception of this environment have been developed. As part of a larger participatory action research, called Flash on my neighborhood! a total of 62 tenant-researchers living in public housing evaluated their residential environment using the Participatory Neighborhood Observation Grid. Results from this multiple case study show that the novel tool presents 1) tenant-researchers’ self-reported appreciation; 2) the capacity to capture the relevant local knowledge; and 3) complementary quantitative and qualitative data for tailored action planning. The Participatory Neighborhood Observation Grid possesses valuable properties aimed at mitigating certain limitations of the available environment observation tools and is suited for both community development research and practice. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.