The Role of Immigrant Concentration Within and Beyond Residential Neighborhoods in Adolescent Alcohol Use

Abstract

Neighborhoods are salient contexts for youth that shape adolescent development partly through informal social controls on their behavior. This research examines how immigrant concentration within and beyond the residential neighborhood influences adolescent alcohol use. Residential neighborhood immigrant concentration may lead to a cohesive, enclave-like community that protects against adolescent alcohol use. But heterogeneity in the immigrant concentrations characterizing the places residents visit as they engage in routine activities outside of the neighborhood where they live may weaken the social control benefits of the social ties and shared cultural orientations present in enclave communities. This study investigates whether the protective influence of residential neighborhood immigrant concentration on adolescent alcohol consumption diminishes when youth live in communities where residents collectively are exposed to areas with more diverse immigrant concentrations. This study tests this contention by analyzing survey and geographic routine activity space data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, and the 2000 census. The sample includes 793 adolescents (48.7% female, 16.5% foreign-born Latino, 42.5% US-born Latino, 11.0% black, 30% white/other) between the ages of 12 and 17 who live in 65 neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. Immigrant concentration among these neighborhoods derives primarily from Latin America. The results from multilevel models show that immigrant concentration protects against adolescent alcohol use only when there is low neighborhood-level diversity of exposures to immigrant concentration among the contexts residents visit outside of their residential neighborhood. This research highlights the importance of considering the effects of aggregate exposures to non-home contexts on adolescent wellbeing.

Ethnic Socialization in Neighborhood Contexts: Implications for Ethnic Attitude and Identity Development Among Mexican‐Origin Adolescents

“…We examined the ethnic structuring of neighborhood environments but did not have measures of neighborhood‐level social processes that might help to explain observed associations. Work that can zero in on the underlying social processes is considered a critical next step, particularly because social processes that have served as the cornerstones of neighborhood effects scholarship (e.g., collective efficacy, intergenerational closure; Leventhal et al., ) have often failed to explain ethnic concentration effects on development in prior works (Browning et al., ; Jackson et al., ). Finally, we were unable to measure dosage or degree of exposure to residential neighborhoods and the socialization processes that take place within them.…”

“…Inconsistencies may be due to the existence of historic, geographic, and demographic contexts in which the range of ethnic concentration was empirically restricted such that the high end of observed values was somewhere in the middle of the range of possible values (e.g., 50% Latino). Such restrictions curtail an ability to observe effects consistent with social disorganization theory because the “higher” empirical levels of ethnic concentration in these samples would not be high enough to be consistent with the homogeneity and cultural similarity explanations advanced (instead, a 50% Latino neighborhood is a heterogeneous or diverse neighborhood; Jackson, Browning, Krivo, Kwan, & Washington, ). Inconsistencies may also reflect support for the structural hypothesis (i.e., high ethnic concentration promotes positive development) without support for the mediating social processes hypothesis (e.g., that the benefits are explained by collective efficacy).…”

“…Especially in light of limited evidence supporting collective efficacy and intergenerational closure as mediators of neighborhood ethnic concentration effects on adolescent development (e.g., Jackson et al., ), it is critical to study alternative pathways, including Parenting × Neighborhood interactions (Leventhal et al., ). Because prior work has called for further theory development in this area (Caughy, Nettles, O'Campo, & Lohrfink, ), we reinterpreted mainstream neighborhood theory and empiricism (Roche & Leventhal, ) to elucidate two kinds of positive Parenting × Neighborhood interactions.…”

“…Inconsistencies may also reflect support for the structural hypothesis (i.e., high ethnic concentration promotes positive development) without support for the mediating social processes hypothesis (e.g., that the benefits are explained by collective efficacy). Indeed, among several studies documenting benefits of high ethnic concentration, the effects remained when social processes were included in the models (Browning, Burrington, Leventhal, & Brooks-Gunn, 2008;Jackson et al, 2016;Sampson, Morenoff, & Raudenbush, 2005), suggesting the need to examine alternative hypotheses and pathways.…”

Ecological Networks and Neighborhood Social Organization

“…Nevertheless, incorporation of daily exposure and mobility patterns into sociologically inspired theoretical models of neighborhood functioning remained limited throughout the 20th century (Matthews and Yang 2013). The most recent wave of neighborhood research—a veritable explosion of empirical analyses examining neighborhood effects on an unprecedented range of outcomes—largely has ignored the actual spatial exposures of residents, with the exception of schools (Arum 2000; Teitler and Weiss 2000; but see Krivo et al 2013; Jones and Pebley 2014; Jackson et al 2015; Sharp, Denney, and Kimbro 2015). The continued neglect of spatial exposures in theoretical and empirical work on neighborhoods no doubt is due, in part, to the lack of available data in large-scale social surveys commonly employed for neighborhood research.…”