Health in the developing world is becoming particularly complex due to disparate economic and environmental contexts residing in close spatial proximity, each paving the way for widely different environmental health hazards resulting in acute and chronic illness. In navigating this increasingly heterogeneous landscape, children in Accra, Ghana face multiple types of environmental health hazards as they travel from home, to school, to friends' houses, and to visit family. A child-in-home, or even child-in-neighborhood model of third world urban health hazards cannot account for the complexity of hazards and health threats faced by children on a daily basis. Yet children in Accra, particularly as they move out of their especially vulnerable early years, manage to navigate and mitigate health hazards. Little is known about how children perceive environmental health hazards: their spatially situated knowledge of hazards within daily environments may lead to a better understanding of how space and place drive human-environment health interactions. Furthermore, numerous studies have demonstrated that children in both the developed and developing world are acting with increased agency regarding health.

This research proposes to advance the health geography, environmental health, and health education literature by working with children from three diverse contextual backgrounds in a developing third world city to examine verbal, visual, and spatial perceptions of health and environmental health hazards. The dissertation does this by establishing baseline differences of children and adult's perceptions of children's health, testing child-friendly visual methods of assessing health knowledge, and developing a novel method of assessing spatial patterns of health perceptions through GPS and photography. Results indicate that children in Accra have distinct, and often varying, perceptions of health when compared to adults and across socioeconomic groups. Photographic methods that contextualize health are good measures of health knowledge and perceptions. Furthermore, placing health perceptions in space as children move through the environment sheds light on spatial properties of health perceptions, such as health related landmarks, and regional categorization of spaces into healthy and unhealthy places.