Neighbourhood Ethnic Density Effects on Behavioural and Cognitive Problems Among Young Racial/Ethnic Minority Children in the US and England: A Cross-National Comparison

Michael R. Kramer,Nan Zhang,Laia Bécares,Jennifer L. Beauregard

doi:10.1007/s11113-017-9445-1

Abstract

Studies on adult racial/ethnic minority populations show that the increased concentration of racial/ethnic minorities in a neighbourhood—a so-called ethnic density effect—is associated with improved health of racial/ethnic minority residents when adjusting for area deprivation. However, this literature has focused mainly on adult populations, individual racial/ethnic groups, and single countries, with no studies focusing on children of different racial/ethnic groups or comparing across nations. This study aims to compare neighbourhood ethnic density effects on young children’s cognitive and behavioural outcomes in the US and in England. We used data from two nationally representative birth cohort studies, the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort and the UK Millennium Cohort Study, to estimate the association between own ethnic density and behavioural and cognitive development at 5 years of age. Findings show substantial heterogeneity in ethnic density effects on child outcomes within and between the two countries, suggesting that ethnic density effects may reflect the wider social and economic context. We argue that researchers should take area deprivation into account when estimating ethnic density effects and when developing policy initiatives targeted at strengthening and improving the health and development of racial and ethnic minority children.

Highlights

It is well documented that most ethnic minority groups in the United States (US) and England fare less well across a wide range of health outcomes than their majority White peers (e.g. Jackson and Mare 2007; Smith et al 2000; Williams and Collins 2001)
Results for English Black Caribbean children showed a detrimental effect of Caribbean ethnic density on total difficulties scores, independent of individual and household characteristics (Table 3, Model 3), whereby as Caribbean ethnic density increased by 10%, total difficulties scores increased by 0.046 (p \ 0.05)
Upon adjustment for individual-level covariates and area-level deprivation, the detrimental ethnic density effect for American Indian children reversed, becoming protective and statistically significant (p \ 0.05) so that an increase of 10% in American Indian density was associated with an increase of prosocial score by 0.039

Summary

Introduction

It is well documented that most ethnic minority groups in the United States (US) and England fare less well across a wide range of health outcomes than their majority White peers (e.g. Jackson and Mare 2007; Smith et al 2000; Williams and Collins 2001). Most of the literature on racial/ethnic health inequalities focuses on adults, a large body of research has documented marked racial/ethnic inequalities in the patterning of early childhood health and developmental outcomes such as birthweight (Kelly et al 2009; Teitler et al 2007), breastfeeding (Kelly et al 2006b), developmental milestones (Kelly et al 2006a), socioemotional difficulties (Zilanawala et al 2015b), obesity (Zilanawala et al 2015a), cognitive scores (Panico and Kelly 2007), and asthma (Nelson et al 1997; Panico et al 2007; Weitzman et al 1990) For both children and adult populations, racial/ethnic inequalities in health are largely explained by reduced socioeconomic status of racial/ethnic minority groups (Nazroo 2000; Williams 1999; Zhang and Wang 2004), including at the area-level (Iceland et al 2011; Karlsen et al 2002; Omi and Winant 2014). We use a cross-national perspective to examine whether ethnic density effects are present for children living in two contrasting but comparable national settings: the US and England

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