The Effects of Neighborhood Disadvantage on Adolescent Development

Abstract

A conceptual framework for studying emerging neighborhood effects on individual development is presented, identifying specific mechanisms and processes by which neighborhood disadvantage influences adolescent developmental outcomes. Using path analyses, the authors test the hypothesis that these organizational and cultural features of neighborhoods mediate the effects of ecological disadvantage on adolescent development and behavior; they then estimate the unique contribution of neighborhood effects on development using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). The study involves samples of neighborhoods from two sites, Chicago and Denver. The analyses support the hypothesis that the effects of ecological disadvantage are mediated by specific organizational and cultural features of the neighborhood. The unique influence of neighborhood effects is relatively small, but in most cases these effects account for a substantial part of the variance explained by the HLM model.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Context

“…Among other classic analyses of poverty that focus either directly or indirectly on the importance of place (Drake and Cayton 1933;DuBois 1899;Hannerz 1969;Harrington 1962;Stack 1974), Liebow (1967) argued that a primary reason why poverty is reproduced across generations, especially among black residents of urban ghettos, is that each generation faces the same lack of economic opportunities, the same discrimination, and the same economic frustration as the one before; the implication of this work is that barriers to economic mobility are rooted in the unique economic and social milieu of the ghetto. More recently, the work of William Julius Wilson (1987Wilson ( , 1996Sampson and Wilson 1995), Robert Sampson (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997;Sampson et al 2002;Elliott et al 1996), and their colleagues has focused attention on the ways that structural disadvantage and aspects of social organization within neighborhoods can influence patterns of behavior within the boundaries of the neighborhood, thereby influencing the life course trajectories of neighborhood residents.…”

Assessing the impact of the local environment on birth outcomes: a case for HLM

“…The role of the local environment plays in determining birth outcomes is ambiguous. There is evidence that the local environment influences the health of different populations in different ways (Elliot et al, 1996;Ahern et al, 2003;Wen et al, 2003;Beckman et al, 2004;Diez-Roux et al, 2004;Sundquist et al, 2004). However, too few studies have examined the influence of culture, contamination, housing, or healthcare and other features of the local environment over infant prematurity, low birthweight, or mortality (Matteson et al, 1998;Kaufman et al, 2003;Savitz et al, 2004).…”

Community Correlates of Rural Youth Violence

“…The original reasoning for the urban context was that high population density creates problems by producing anonymity that interferes with that arrests might reflect the behavior of law enforcement officers more than the behavior of offenders. Fortunately, findings relating social disorganization to arrests have been replicated by more recent studies that measured offending through citizen calls for police assistance (Warner and Pierce, 1993), self-reports of victims (Sampson, 1985;Sampson and Groves, 1989), and self-reports of offenders (Elliott et al, 1996). This study's measure of delinquency was the per capita arrest rate of juveniles ages 11-17 in each county, pooled over the 5-year period from 1989 through 1993.…”