Abstract
We studied the relation between cumulative exposure to neighbourhood deprivation and adolescents’ Big Five personality traits, and the moderating role of personality in the relation between neighbourhood deprivation and the development of problem behaviour and educational attainment. We studied 5365 British adolescents from ages 10 to 16, with neighbourhood information from birth onwards. Extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness to experience moderated the relation between deprivation and problem behaviour. For educational attainment, only extraversion was a moderator. This means that higher values on personality traits were related to weaker relations between neighbourhood deprivation and problem behaviour and educational attainment. The results showed the importance of taking into account adolescents’ personality when assessing developmental outcomes in relation to neighbourhood deprivation.
Highlights
To examine how adolescents’ personality traits related to how they responded to cumulative exposure to neighbourhood deprivation, we studied the person-environment interaction between cumulative exposure to neighbourhood deprivation and personality traits in predicting the development of problem behaviour and educational attainment
The level of problem behaviour was positively correlated and math results were negatively correlated with both neighbourhood Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) decile at age 13 and exposure to neighbourhood deprivation
We examined how and to what extent cumulative exposure to neighbourhood deprivation during childhood related to the Big Five personality traits, and how these personality traits moderate the relation between exposure to neighbourhood deprivation and youth’s developmental outcomes
Summary
The socio-economic status of the neighbours living in the area surrounding the home in which adolescents grew up is often found to be related to developmental outcomes such as problem behaviour (Leventhal et al, 2009; Nieuwenhuis et al, 2017a; Xue et al, 2005; Yu et al, 2016) and educational attainment (Chetty et al, 2016; Dietz, 2002; Jencks & Mayer, 1990; Nieuwenhuis & Hooimeijer, 2016; Nieuwenhuis et al, 2013). The residential neighbourhood may be related to adolescents’ problem behaviour and educational attainment through social learning and role model mechanisms (Ainsworth, 2002; Akers et al, 1979). Based on such reasoning, policy responses were to create more socio-economically mixed neighbourhoods, assuming that that poor families could benefit from the presence of, and interaction with more affluent families (Galster & Friedrichs, 2015). Many studies show weak evidence for neighbourhood effects (Nieuwenhuis, 2016), which may be caused by not taking into account individual differences. Taking into account differences between people within neighbourhoods is crucial to understand what kind of effect a neighbourhood may have on its residents, because a generalised finding for the whole neighbourhood population may not do justice to the different experiences neighbourhood residents may have
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