Neighborhood and Friendship Composition in Adolescence

Christofer Edling,Jens Rydgren

doi:10.1177/2158244012466249

Abstract

The social surroundings in which an individual grows up and spends his or her everyday life have an effect on his or her life chances. Much of the research into this phenomenon focuses on so-called neighborhood effects and has put particular emphasis on the negative effects of growing up in a poor neighborhood. Originating from the sociological study of inner-city problems in the United States, the research has recently been embraced by Scandinavian social scientists, who have generally assessed the phenomenon with reference to social network effects and the lock-in effects of ethnic enclaves. We critique the theoretical assumptions that we find in recent Scandinavian research and argue that a straightforward interpretation of neighborhood effects in terms of network effects is problematic. Our argument is based on an empirical analysis of friendship circles of ninth graders in Stockholm ( N = 240). We conclude that the friendship networks of ninth graders extend well beyond the neighborhood, thus casting serious doubt on the network effects assumption of previous research. We also conclude that there is nothing in the reality of these ninth graders that confirms the established concept of the ethnic enclave.

Highlights

Residential segregation and the unequal distribution of life chances that it may engender pose a major challenge for contemporary welfare states because an immigration policy that does not provide equal opportunities to recent and established citizens is a failed one
We set out to scrutinize this assumption by studying the friendships of ninth graders in three different schools by asking how their circles of close friends are constituted with respect to sex, ethnicity, school class, and neighborhood
The demographics of the samples in the three schools, displayed in Table 2, mirror the skew distribution of people of foreign origin that we find in the three areas, with 33% of the students in Sofia being of foreign background compared with 41% in Brandbergen, and 98% in Alby

Summary

Introduction

Residential segregation and the unequal distribution of life chances that it may engender pose a major challenge for contemporary welfare states because an immigration policy that does not provide equal opportunities to recent and established citizens is a failed one. Social scientists are increasingly interested in trying to establish residential segregation as a fact and investigating its short- and long-term consequences. One highly influential concept in this literature is that of the neighborhood, and that of neighborhood effects. Developed in the context of inner cities in the United States, it is increasingly being applied in Scandinavian research as well. In an attempt to argue the underlying mechanisms of neighborhood effects, various analysts have proposed that people’s everyday social interaction is so intrinsically nested within neighborhood that the neighborhood effect can be interpreted as a social interaction effect, or even as a social network effect. We set out to scrutinize this assumption by studying the friendships of ninth graders in three different schools by asking how their circles of close friends are constituted with respect to sex, ethnicity, school class, and neighborhood

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Results

Conclusion