Children and Neighborhood Context 1
CHILDREN AND
NEIGHBORHOOD CONTEXT
Literature Review
Jackey Elinski, M.A.
Doctoral Student
Sociology Department
State University of New York at Buffalo
Michael P. Farrell, Ph.D
Professor
Sociology Department
State University of New York at Buffalo
Meg Brin: CDHS Child Welfare Administrative Director
Tom Needell: CDHS Child Welfare Trainer
Mike Rowe: CDHS Child Welfare Sr. Trainer
Appointment: January 1, 2003 to June 30, 2003
This project was funded through a partnership between the Center for the Development of Human Services, Buffalo State College Research Foundation and the Sociology 1029071, Task 2)
Abstract
Recently the impact of neighborhoods on the families that live in them has become a widely studied topic in the social sciences. With this neighborhood context theory in mind, researchers have paid particular attention to the connection between communities and their influence over child and adolescent development. They have explored areas such as how neighborhood composition influences family processes and parenting styles, how the presence or absence of neighborhood resources affects family and child success, and how the socioeconomic make-up of a neighborhood impacts the community’s degree of social cohesion and how this, in turn, affects children’s development.
The following presents an overview of the current academic literature that focuses on how neighborhood context influences child and adolescent development in the areas of educational attainment, cognitive skills, crime, teenage sexual behavior, and labor market success. The different theoretical models that frame this research are explained and methodological concerns are addressed. In addition, a brief history of how this topic has come to be a much researched area in sociology is discussed.
I. Introduction
During the 1990s there was an increased academic interest in studying the impact of neighborhoods on children and adolescents. More specifically, researchers were interested in how poverty stricken neighborhoods played a part in shaping the life chances of the children who lived in them, since by 1990, 12% of families and 19.9% of children in the United States were living in poverty (Seccombe 2000:1094). Not only were social scientists concerned with the mechanisms by which neighborhoods influence children and adolescents, they were also interested in exactly what ways neighborhoods impact youths and what can be done to possibly moderate any “neighborhood effects.” Much of the literature on this topic credits Wilson’s 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged as being the catalyst for this new flurry of research about neighborhoods.
In this book Wilson attempts to explain the creation and expansion of the mostly African-American underclass in American cities since the middle of the twentieth century. He argues that the extreme social isolation of the members of the underclass brought on by changes in the United States’ economy is primarily to blame for this. According to Wilson, the shift from an industrial economy to a service oriented economy saw most of the industrial manufacturing jobs disappear from American cities. These positions, which were generally well paying jobs for unskilled workers, were mostly replaced with low wage service sector jobs and more skill intense jobs located out in the suburbs. As a result, many inner city residents lost their jobs and middle-class African-Americans fled the inner cities in pursuit of the newly created suburban jobs.
Those left behind in the city cores were faced with very limited employment opportunities and little contact with middle-class America. Therefore, as joblessness became rampant among the urban poor, poverty and the social evils associated with it became concentrated in the inner cities thus creating an underclass that is so socially isolated from other segments of society that a vicious cycle of concentrated poverty is almost certain to continue.
Subsequent researchers studying neighborhoods have viewed the implications of Wilson’s argument about concentrated poverty as potentially effecting the life chances and developmental outcomes of the children and adolescents who grow up in such disadvantaged neighborhoods. While Wilson’s book may have ignited a flame, the 1990 analysis of the existent literature by Jencks and Mayer helped to create an explosion of interest in neighborhoods and their impact on children. In fact, so much research on this topic has been done recently that Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley (2002) contend that “the study of neighborhood effects, for better or worse, has become something of a cottage industry in the social sciences.”
II. Overview of Theoretical Frameworks and Models of Neighborhood Effects
In their analysis, Jencks and Mayer (1990) found that a number of theoretical frameworks are used by researchers when trying to decipher just how neighborhoods affect those who grow up in them. For example, some researchers see the behaviors and problems in a neighborhood as being contagious. Their epidemic models imply that individual behavior is linked to the behavior of others in the neighborhood. When negative behaviors persist, these models predict that problem behavior will infiltrate the behaviors of the children and adolescents who reside in these neighborhoods and negative behavior will beget negative behavior.
According to Small and Newman (2001), epidemic models, as well as other socialization models, tend to view individuals as “relatively passive recipients of powerful socializing forces, suggesting that neighborhoods mold those who grow up in them into certain behavioral patterns” (p. 33). Therefore, according to epidemic models, children and adolescents can “catch” the negative behaviors of their neighborhood peers and they will then be socialized into behaving in similar negative ways.
Other researchers, according to Jencks and Mayer (1990), use collective socialization models to explain how neighborhoods influence residents. These predict that the level of social organization in a neighborhood influences children and adolescents. Baumer and South (2001) assert that these models emphasize “the impact of parents and other adults in the community as both family role models and as agents of social control” (p. 541).
According to this model, the higher the level of neighborhood social organization, the more positive the outcomes for the youth that live in the area. However, low neighborhood social organization, indicated by such symptoms as the absence of adult mentors, adult supervision, and the lack of adult daily routines that reflect “mainstream” lifestyles, impacts negatively on children and adolescents. According to Newman (1999) a lack of successful adult role models in a socially disorganized neighborhood leaves the children and adolescents of the neighborhood less likely to foresee themselves as successful adults. Therefore, these collective socialization models predict that neighborhood adults are instrumental in socializing children and adolescents into becoming successful adults.
Another theoretical framework that Jencks and Mayer (1990) identified as in use with regard to studying neighborhood effects is the use of models of competition. These predict that neighbors must compete for community resources. This implies that the life chances of economically disadvantaged youths may be hurt by the presence of more affluent neighbors who are more readily able to compete for scarce neighborhood resources. Relatively less advantaged neighborhood youths, according to these models, will be left behind, as those who are more successful in obtaining and utilizing community resources will be the ones who reap any benefits.
Closely related, Jencks and Mayer (1990) also noted that neighborhood institutional models have been in use. These focus on how adults from outside of the neighborhood treat and influence children through their work in neighborhood institutions such as schools, libraries, and the police force. They posit that adults who come into the neighborhood to work may have preconceived notions about poor children in poor neighborhoods and may react to them accordingly. According to these models, the presence or absence of such adults may affect the children and adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods. According to Small and Newman (2001), these institutional models “focus on how individual agency is limited by neighborhood environment,” while socialization models “explain how neighborhood environments socialize individuals” (p. 33).
And lastly, Jencks and Mayer (1990) identified that social scientists have used relative deprivation models to explain how neighborhoods impact the children and adolescents who live in them. As with models of competition, these models too imply that the presence of affluent neighbors will hurt the life chances of economically disadvantaged youths. When poor children, as well as adults, judge that they have less or are failures compared to their affluent neighbors, this will adversely affect them. However, if their neighbors are on an equal socioeconomic playing field or are economically worse off then they are themselves, children, as well as adults, will judge themselves more favorably.
Much of the research on neighborhood effects that has been done since Jencks and Mayer published their review still uses these theoretical frameworks that they identified. In addition, considerable amounts of the more current research still concentrates on the five areas that Jencks and Mayer focused on in their analysis when estimating the effects of neighborhoods on children and adolescents in their 1990 publication. These areas are educational attainment, cognitive skills, crime, teenage sexual behavior, and labor market success. Even now, though more than a decade has passed since the classic work of Jencks and Mayer, researchers in this field are still preoccupied with finding out if these outcomes are influenced by the neighborhood context in which children and adolescents grow up in.
The following sections of this paper will present an overview of what Jencks and Mayer found in their 1990 review of the academic literature concerning children and neighborhoods. In addition, more recent research will be presented that focuses on the five aforementioned areas of research concerning children and adolescents and neighborhood effects: educational attainment, cognitive skills, crime, teenage sexual behavior, and labor market success.
III. Neighborhood Effects and Educational Attainment
In their review of the literature that existed prior to 1990, Jencks and Mayer found
that some of the earliest research on neighborhood effects looked at education. These early studies examined whether a high school’s mean socioeconomic status had an impact on students’ plans to attend college. However, different studies yielded different results. For example, after analyzing the existent literature, Jencks and Mayer concluded that students in higher socioeconomic status neighborhoods expected to complete more years of education than did students in other neighborhoods, even after their family characteristics were controlled for. However, they also found that a “high school’s social composition, in contrast, has very little effect on a student’s chances of finishing high school or attending college” suggesting that “neighborhood mix matters while school mix does not” (Jencks and Mayer 1990:137).
In addition, they also found that attending a racially mixed high socioeconomic status high school might be more beneficial to African-American students. While attending these schools does not alter college plans for European-American students, African-American students enrolled at such schools appear to be more likely to plan to attend college than their counterparts in other high schools. In the end, however, according to Jencks and Mayer (1990), “teenagers who grow up in affluent neighborhoods end up with more schooling than teenagers from similar families who grow up in poorer neighborhoods” (p.174).
Similar results regarding school and neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics have been echoed in more recent research. For example, Brooks-Gunn et al. (1993) found support for collective socialization theories that suggest that the absence of affluent families in a neighborhood is more detrimental to child and adolescent development than is the presence of low-income families, which epidemic theories, models of competition, and relative deprivation frameworks posit. Specifically, they found significant effects of affluent neighbors on adolescent school leaving that persist even after the socioeconomic characteristics of students’ families were controlled for. In addition, contrary to what Jencks and Mayer concluded, their results suggest that the benefit of affluent neighbors in regard to school leaving is restricted to European-American students.
Other recent studies too, have yielded similar results. Duncan (1994), for example, found evidence that high neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics are positively associated with educational attainment levels for adolescents. Ensminger et al. (1996) found this to be true even when studying a group of adolescents that was predominantly African-American. And Crane (1991) found that when the percentage of professional and managerial workers in a neighborhood falls below 5%, neighborhoods have a more significant negative influence on resident students’ school leaving. In addition, according to Rosenbaum and Harris (2001), after leaving Chicago’s public housing, mothers who moved to higher-income neighborhoods reported that their children were more likely to graduate from high school than were children in the neighborhoods that these mothers had recently moved from. All of these results suggest that theories of collective socialization may be on target. It seems that affluent neighbors have a positive impact on students’ educational attainment.
Ainsworth (2002) also found support for theories of collective socialization. In his study aimed at exposing neighborhood characteristics that influence educational achievement and the possible mechanisms that mediate these neighborhood effects, he concluded that “the presence of high- [socioeconomic] status residents in the neighborhood plays a statistically important role in students’ academic achievement” (p. 132). For example, he found that while family socioeconomic status is important in predicting the time children spend on homework and also their academic achievement, so too is the socioeconomic status of their neighbors. For instance, his results indicate that a greater number of high socioeconomic status residents in a neighborhood strongly predicted more time spent on homework as well as higher math and reading test scores. According to Ainsworth, his results indicate that “the number of neighborhood high-status residents rivals the predictive power of many family and school factors that are often cited in the educational literature” (p. 132).
While these researchers and others (Aaronson 1998; Garner and Raudenbush 1991; Gonzales, et al. 1996; Kasarda 1993; Rosenbaum and Harris 2001) have concluded from their studies that neighborhoods do in fact matter when it comes to the educational attainment and achievement of neighborhood children and adolescents, others (Ginther, Haveman, and Wolfe 2000; Jencks and Mayer 1990; Solon, Page, and Duncan 2000), however, do question the robustness of the relationship between neighborhoods and educational outcomes. However, even after concluding that the “complete equalization of neighborhood backgrounds would leave inequality in educational attainment at more than 90% of its current level” and cautioning that “no one should be under the delusion that even total elimination of disparities in neighborhood background would get rid of most of the inequality in educational attainment,” Solon et al. (2000) do concede that “even if neighborhood correlations for other outcomes turn out to be as small as that for education, this does not deny that neighborhoods matter to some degree” (p. 391.) With this question of robustness in mind, it is evident that further research is still needed when it comes to neighborhood effects and child and adolescent outcomes in this and other areas.