Todd M. Ruppar

Health and quality of life vary across neighborhoods, showing that where people live shapes how they live. However, current quantitative geo-focused methods exploring neighborhood impacts on health do not fully capture how people experience places. Nurse researchers’ grounding in the nursing metaparadigm (person, environment, health, and nursing) positions them to lead inquiry into how social and physical neighborhood environments affect health. We propose a nursing-led Go-along Virtual INTERview (GVIv) approach that utilizes digital street-view platforms to conduct virtual interviews to investigate how neighborhoods shape lived experiences. Guided by the Political Ecology Framework to contextualize historical, cultural, and political-economic influences on health, and principles of community-engaged research, we used the GVIv approach to situate narratives of individuals with opioid use disorders in Chicago. This approach combines in-person and virtual semi-structured interviews to explore how built, social, economic, cultural, and temporal neighborhood factors shape health. Our pilot application of GVIv showed promise in eliciting rich contextual data, shifting researcher–participant dynamics, reducing resource expenditure, and enhancing safety. GVIv expands nursing research by offering a participant-centered, scalable approach to examine place-based health influences and inform equitable policy and intervention design.