Mooney et al. Respond to “Observing Neighborhood Physical Disorder”

We appreciate Dr. Jackelyn Hwang's comments (1) on our paper in which we compared a virtual audit of Detroit, Michigan, using data from Google Street View (Google, Inc., Mountain View, California) with an in-person audit of the same city (2). Broadly, we concur with her observations regarding the benefits and limitations of virtual audits and share her excitement regarding how the technique might be leveraged in the future. We elaborate here on key points raised by Dr. Hwang, emphasizing decision points relevant to future research using virtual audits.

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First, we concur that ordinary kriging, the interpolation technique that we and others have used for spatially sampled neighborhood data (3–6), does not account for block-by-block...