Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children, Volume 1

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 14 No. 1 (2004) ISSN: 1546-2250 Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children, Volume 1 Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne and Aber, J. Lawrence and Duncan, Greg (1991). New York: Russell Sage Foundation; 334 pages. $55.00. ISBN 0871541882. While there is a long-standing tradition of social research that associates the concentration of poverty within children’s residential areas with a host of negative outcomes, prior to the publication of the Neighborhood Poverty texts in 1997, little systematic research existed to explain the neighborhood characteristics that affect children, youth, and their families. In response to this need, an interdisciplinary group of leading social scientists convened with the goal of better understanding the ways in which neighborhoods and communities influence the development of poor children and adolescents. This working group aimed to develop theory, concepts, methods, and empirical findings to guide future research in the field of neighborhood studies. Using a common conceptual and analytical framework and employing six different data sets that include both national and local site studies, they analyzed the separate and combined effects of families and neighborhood residence on child and adolescent development. Their findings are described in the two-volume set. Although the questions and hypotheses that the authors generate are not fully answered in these volumes, they clearly identify the theoretical and methodological issues involved in neighborhood research and provide valuable recommendations for future research. Volume 1 focuses on the conceptual framework and the findings from the quantitative analyses undertaken by the research group. Volume 2 emphasizes the methodological and policy implications involved in studying neighborhood effects. Also included in Volume 2 are examples 381 of other neighborhood research and suggestions for the next generation of neighborhood studies. By developing and testing a conceptual framework that combines neighborhood and community influences with an integrative model of child and youth development, Volume 1 breaks important theoretical ground. The model draws most heavily on the developmental-ecological framework and on social disorganization theory. According to the developmentalecological framework, child development takes place within a set of embedded contexts that include both micro- and macrolevel systems and their interactions. From this perspective, how the neighborhood influences children and youth is likely to vary across developmental stages. Focusing on two broad areas of child and adolescent development – cognitiveacademic and social-emotional – these texts examine the effects of the neighborhood throughout four general developmental epochs: (1) preschool childhood, (2) school-age childhood, (3) younger adolescents, and (4) older adolescents. To explain the social processes by which the neighborhood is expected to influence child and youth development, the authors base their theoretical model on previous research in the tradition of social disorganization theory. Consistent with social disorganization theory, the framework they outline includes the following elements: neighborhood socioeconomic composition (e.g., the physical environment, community socioeconomic status, age, gender, residential stability, housing density, ethnic heterogeneity, and institutional resources), social organization (e.g., organizational participation, informal social networks, and collective supervision of youth), and cultural processes (e.g., clarity and consensus of norms and values). The main findings from the studies presented in these texts suggest that neighborhood does matter for child and youth development. Results from data sets spanning across the stages of child development showed the strongest neighborhood effects in early childhood years and late 382 adolescence, while less powerful effects were found in between. However, the size of the neighborhood effects was usually much smaller than the effects of family-level conditions. Given that the authors candidly acknowledge the limitations of their research, it is important to view these studies as a preliminary attempt to understand the relationship between the neighborhood and child and youth development. The limitations of these studies are clearly identified in Chapter 9 of Volume 1 and should be taken into account when interpreting their results. For example, since the data sets were not originally designed to study neighborhood effects, the neighborhood level measures are limited to structuralcompositional factors using census data. Consequently, critically important institutional and organizational factors and social processes (e.g., resources, informal social networks and controls, and delinquent opportunity structures) are not measured. Other limitations concern selection bias because the analyses fail to adjust fully for...