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Any study that examines the effects of area-based attributes on individual behaviors or outcomes faces another fundamental methodological problem besides the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). It is the problem that results about these effects can be affected by how contextual units or neighborhoods are geographically delineated and the extent to which these areal units deviate from the true geographic context. The problem arises because of the spatial uncertainty in the actual areas that exert the contextual influences under study and the temporal uncertainty in the timing and duration in which individuals experienced these contextual influences. Using neighborhood effects and environmental health research as a point of departure, this article clarifies the nature and sources of this problem, which is referred to as the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP). It highlights some of the inferential errors that the UGCoP might cause and discusses some means for mitigating the problem. It reviews recent studies to show that both contextual variables and research findings are sensitive to different delineations of contextual units. The article argues that the UGCoP is a problem as fundamental as the MAUP but is a different kind of problem. Future research needs to pay explicit attention to its potential confounding effects on research results and to methods for mitigating the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental pollutants are now widespread not only in the environment but in human bodies. Seafood is one of the main sources of human exposure to many of these chemicals, with concern mainly about effects on fetal development. This article examines toxicological, epidemiological, and other public health scholarship on contaminated seafood to understand how these environmental health concerns are constituted as an object of knowledge and management. Analyzing current approaches to contaminated seafood through the lens of biopolitics, the article shows that the dominant approach is one in which risk is used to secure the population by calculating the net benefits and hazards of women's seafood consumption, with the goal being to influence women's “seafood choices.” This marks a new arena of biopolitical concern about how the contaminated environment is changing the nature of humans by altering cognitive development and intelligence. It also marks a new, highly gendered regime of biosecurity in which women are positioned as protectors of the population against the threat of contamination. By calculating proper seafood choices, risk spatializes reproductive women as the bodily threshold between the contaminated environment and the population. Risk thus places responsibility for environmental health on women, who must make proper choices to manage movement of pollutants through their own bodies. In making this argument, the article opens up a new field of inquiry into health as a nature–society issue and contributes new insight about the constitutive role of both gender and environment in biopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]