Skill-Based Contextual Sorting: How Parental Cognition and Residential Mobility Produce Unequal Environments for Children

Abstract

Highly skilled parents deploy distinct strategies to cultivate their children’s development, but little is known about how parental cognitive skills interact with metropolitan opportunity structures and residential mobility to shape a major domain of inequality in children’s lives: the neighborhood. We integrate multiple literatures to develop hypotheses on parental skill-based sorting by neighborhood socioeconomic status and public school test scores, which we test using an original follow-up of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey. These data include more than a decade’s worth of residential histories for households with children that are linked to census, geographic information system, and educational administrative data. We construct discrete-choice models of neighborhood selection that account for heterogeneity among household types, incorporate the unique spatial structure of Los Angeles County, and include a wide range of neighborhood factors. The results show that parents’ cognitive skills interact with neighborhood socioeconomic status to predict residential selection after accounting for, and confirming, the expected influences of race, income, education, housing market conditions, and spatial proximity. Among parents in the upper/upper-middle class, cognitive skills predict sorting on average public school test scores rather than neighborhood socioeconomic status. Overall, we reveal skill-based contextual sorting as an overlooked driver of urban stratification.

Parental Depression and Contextual Selection: The Case of School Choice

“…The neighborhood attainment literature is beginning to inform these questions. Recent research supplements neighborhood attainment studies' long-standing focus on race and income with examinations of how parental factors deemed central to child development (e.g., educational attainment, cognitive skills) affect children's contextual conditions and future life chances (Schachner and Sampson 2020). In other words, sociologists are reconceiving contextual selection as not only a process of structural sorting (Krysan and Crowder 2017) but also of intergenerational reproduction (Sastry and Pebley 2010).…”

“…Inattention to this possibility may partially reflect life course theory’s emphasis on very young children, given their particularly malleable cognitive skills (Duncan and Magnuson 2011; Reardon and Galindo 2009), and the family domain, where young children spend most of their time. Neighborhood and school sorting scholars, for their part, highlight the roles of race and class (Krysan and Crowder 2017) but rarely consider cognitive and socioemotional factors’ effects on contextual selection (Schachner and Sampson 2020).…”

“…First, children’s cognitive and especially socioemotional skills remain malleable in the K–12 years, when families’ dominant role is partially supplanted by neighborhoods and schools (Wodtke and Parbst 2017). Second, race and class remain central drivers of children’s environmental contexts, but the ascendance of choice-based policies (e.g., housing/private school vouchers, charter school expansion) and publicly accessible information on school and neighborhood quality plausibly increases intragroup disparities in parents’ ability to access, interpret, and act on often complex data (Schachner and Sampson 2020). If depression compromises these crucial capacities, then a novel mediating pathway linking the condition and child development emerges.…”

Impacto da pandemia da COVID-19 na qualidade de vida, saúde e renda nas famílias com e sem risco socioeconômico: estudo transversal

“…Em 2018, mais do que 13 milhões de brasileiros viveram em situação de pobreza e extrema pobreza (IBGE, 2019). Certamente, essas famílias que estão expostas aos riscos socioeconômicos são mais vulneráveis e suscetíveis à exposição de outros riscos associados à pobreza e a carência de informações (Baker, 2019) quando comparadas com famílias que não estão expostas a estes mesmos riscos socioeconômicos (Schachner & Sampson, 2020;Neuman, Desmarais, Iverson, & Gartstein, 2020;Gordo et al, 2018). Lactentes, crianças e adolescentes de baixo nível socioeconômico, por exemplo, podem apresentar atraso no desenvolvimento neuropsicomotor e limitações nas atividades nas quais podem gerar resultados negativos na idade adulta e consequentemente restrição na participação (Baker, 2019;Schachner & Sampson, 2020;Neuman et al, 2020;El-Din et al, 2019).…”

“…Certamente, essas famílias que estão expostas aos riscos socioeconômicos são mais vulneráveis e suscetíveis à exposição de outros riscos associados à pobreza e a carência de informações (Baker, 2019) quando comparadas com famílias que não estão expostas a estes mesmos riscos socioeconômicos (Schachner & Sampson, 2020;Neuman, Desmarais, Iverson, & Gartstein, 2020;Gordo et al, 2018). Lactentes, crianças e adolescentes de baixo nível socioeconômico, por exemplo, podem apresentar atraso no desenvolvimento neuropsicomotor e limitações nas atividades nas quais podem gerar resultados negativos na idade adulta e consequentemente restrição na participação (Baker, 2019;Schachner & Sampson, 2020;Neuman et al, 2020;El-Din et al, 2019). Além disso, o risco socioeconômico pode ser um dos fatores responsáveis pela instabilidade residencial, desnutrição infantil, dificuldade em acesso à saúde (menor cobertura de imunização), aumento das morbidades na infância, o que gera uma grande preocupação à saúde pública (Baker, 2019;Buss & Filho, 2007;Carrapato, Correia, & Garcia, 2017).…”