Schools can be supporting environments in disadvantaged neighborhoods

Abstract

In Sweden, as in many other European countries, poor neighborhoods with ethnically diverse inhabitants and high crime rates have grown up around big cities in the last decades. We hypothesized that, compared with adolescents in advantaged neighborhoods, adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods would perceive their schools as relatively safe, due to their contrast with the more threatening and dangerous neighborhoods they lived in. Also, they would perceive their schools as relatively more open to their influence, due to the contrast with a lack of influence in their families. More broadly, they would experience their schools as supporting environments to a greater extent than adolescents in advantaged neighborhoods. We tested these ideas using a sample of 1390 adolescents (Mage = 14.34, SD = 1.01) in a Swedish city. The hypotheses were supported, and the findings were most salient for immigrant adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Thus, particularly for immigrant adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods, schools can be supporting environments, which should have implications for local policies regarding resource allocation to schools and student influence. Overall, schools seem to be able to play an important role in students’ lives by functioning as a positive contrast to negative out-of-school experiences in disadvantaged neighborhoods.