Philadelphia Community Research Articles

Language attitudes and heritage language maintenance among Chinese immigrant families in the USA

This qualitative study investigates attitudes toward heritage language (HL) maintenance among Chinese immigrant parents and their second-generation children. Specific attention is given to exploring (1) what attitudes are held by the Chinese parents and children toward Chinese language maintenance in the USA, (2) what efforts are engaged in by the Chinese parents in promoting children's HL maintenance, and how do the second-generation children respond to these efforts? Data for this paper are drawn from participant observations in two Chinese local communities in Philadelphia and ethnographic interviews with 18 Chinese immigrant families in the communities. Analysis of the data indicates that while the Chinese parents value their HL as a resource and take positive actions to maintain the HL in the next generation, the children fail to see the relevance of HL learning in their life and often resist parents' efforts in HL maintenance. The results of the study suggest that American mainstream schools should work together with immigrant parents and HL schools to incorporate children's HL in the official school curriculum and create a supportive environment for HL learning.

Making a Difference: The Impact of Traditional Male Role Models on Drug Sale Activity and Violence Involving Black Urban Youth

Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street provides an ethnographic account of a disadvantaged urban environment where residents face poverty and racial residential isolation. For Anderson, joblessness among African-American men deprive youth of positive male role models, creating a context for the “street code” to govern behavior, leading youth to violence. Similarly, a disadvantaged urban setting in which opportunities in legitimate labor markets are lacking fosters an environment where youth may seek illicit markets for a means of economic support. Drawing on Anderson's work, we assess the availability of male role models (older, employed black males) and the concentration of urban disadvantage on black juvenile drug sales and violent arrests across multiple cities in 2000. We find Anderson's concerns over the removal of traditional role models as a result of rising disadvantage in a Philadelphia community to be generalized to large urban areas. Specifically, we find that the presence of traditional role models reduces aggravated assaults by youth, but male role models are unable to reduce the economic lure of drug sales for black urban youth in disadvantaged environments.

Book Review: Dilworth, R. (Ed.). (2006). Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press

Book Review: Dilworth, R. (Ed.). (2006). Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press

Depressive Symptoms in Disadvantaged Women Receiving Prenatal Care: The Influence of Adverse and Positive Childhood Experiences

To determine the association between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), positive influences in childhood (PICs), and depressive symptoms among low-income pregnant women. Face-to-face survey of women receiving prenatal care at Philadelphia community health centers. We conducted surveys at the first prenatal care visit and at a mean age +/- standard deviation of 11 +/- 1 months postpartum, and obtained information on sociodemographic characteristics and childhood experiences before age 16. Group differences were tested with respect to a cutpoint of 23 on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale (CES-D), with the chi(2) test used for categorical variables and the Student's t test used for continuous variables. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to adjust for potential confounding variables. The sample consisted of 1476 mostly young, African American, low-income women. The majority (70% and 90%, respectively) of women reported at least one ACE and one PIC. For each ACE, affected women were more likely to have depressive symptoms than their counterparts. There was a dose-response effect in that a higher number of ACEs was associated with a higher likelihood of having depressive symptoms. PICs, on the other hand, were associated with a lower likelihood of having depressive symptoms. Among low-income women, ACEs were associated with a higher likelihood of having depressive symptoms in a dose-response fashion, and PICs were associated with a lower risk. Efforts to prevent ACEs and to promote PICs might help reduce the risk of depressive symptoms and their associated problems in adulthood.

Continuous Source of Care Among Young Underserved Children: Associated Characteristics and Use of Recommended Parenting Practices

The aim of this study was to 1) assess sociodemographic and health characteristics associated with having a continuous source of care (CSOC) among young children and 2) determine the relationship between having a CSOC and use of parenting practices. We conducted a prospective, community-based survey of women receiving prenatal care at Philadelphia community health centers. We conducted surveys at the first prenatal visit and at a mean age +/- standard deviation of 3 +/-1, 11 +/- 1, and 24 +/- 2 months postpartum, obtaining information on sociodemographic and health characteristics, child's health care provider, and 6 parenting practices. Group differences were tested between those with and without a CSOC by using the chi-square test for categorical variables and the Student's t test for continuous variables. Logistic regression analysis was conducted to adjust for potential confounding variables. Our sample consisted of 894 mostly young, African American, single women and their children. In the adjusted analysis, mothers of children with a CSOC, when compared with those without a CSOC, were more likely to have a high school education or less, be born in the United States, have a postpartum checkup, have stable child health insurance, and initiate care for their child at a site other than a community-based health center. Use of parenting practices was similar for children with and without a CSOC. Maternal nativity, postpartum care, child health insurance, and initial site of infant care were associated with CSOC, but infant health characteristics were not. Use of parenting practices did not differ for those with and without a CSOC.

"She Came to Work": The Female Labor Force in Chester County, 1750–1820

"She Came to Work" The Female Labor Force in Chester County, 1750–1820 Lucy Simler This essay was presented to a seminar of the Transformation of the Delaware Valley Project on May 11, 1987, and is published in memory of the late Lucy Simler, who died December 20, 2005, at age seventy-nine. She was an important and exceptionally generous contributor to the scholarly communities in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Chester County and to the earliest incarnations of what is now the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. This research by Lucy Simler on female wage labor was never published and remains a unique, although still preliminary, look at the economic lives of rural middling and poorer women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 It has all the hallmarks of Lucy Simler's detailed investigations: [End Page 427] an encyclopedic knowledge of underutilized primary sources, particularly for Chester County, a deep concern for commoners and the daily routines of everyday economic and social life, and a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity that might sometimes be elliptic or obscure to those who did not know Chester County as she did, but that always probed deeply into the archival record. She was engaged with current scholarship and had the ability to raise significant research questions. This study of women and work is especially appropriate because Lucy Simler was a pioneer in her own right who had to struggle for recognition as a woman and as a scholar. She was a valued friend and colleague to her peers and a role model and mentor to several generations of younger historians. This essay is not a finished product, but it is hoped that this belated publication of her research on women and wages will encourage others to explore the questions concerning gender, labor, consumption, and access to money that are raised here in a preliminary fashion and that await further study. The paper has been silently and lightly edited for style, and footnotes have been added [in square brackets]. Occasionally, unstated assumptions and conclusions have been inserted [also placed in square brackets]. It is otherwise as she wrote it in 1987, and it serves, in her own words, "to right the balance." —Susan E. Klepp, ed. * * * The purpose of this essay is to present some preliminary findings on the female labor force in Chester County in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The study is part of a larger project that argues that the wage laborer in rural Pennsylvania was as important in the development of the economy of the Middle Atlantic region as were the slave and indentured servant in the South or the family laborer in New England.2 An exploration [End Page 428] of the contributions and conditions of this labor force is essential to the understanding of the broader topic: the "Transformation of the Delaware Valley." In earlier work I have dealt with male laborers. Here, to right the balance, I shall deal with their important but heretofore little-studied counterparts, female laborers.3 Most women in Chester County were "working women" [in the sense that they labored and were not leisured]. By "the female labor force," I mean those women who, lacking land and capital, were dependent on their own labor for survival, for upward mobility, or for small luxuries (perhaps a silk handkerchief or calfskin shoes), and who, for varying lengths of time over their life cycle, were wage laborers. The focus will be on servants, the wives of cottagers, and widows without means. Although many of these women entered the labor force as indentured servants or slaves and, in a sense, competed with them in the labor market, this essay will treat slavery and servitude only indirectly. These limits are for practical reasons. Laboring, wage-earning women made up a large segment of the population in these years, yet we know little about them: What was the size of the female labor...

Product Review: Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia

Product Review: Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia

Social capital in the city: community and civic life in Philadelphia

Introduction: The Place that Loves You Back? - Richardson Dilworth Part I: Social Capital in Historical Context 1 The 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia: Elite Networks and Political Culture - Jerome Hodos 2 Bonfires, Fistfights, and Roaring Cannons: Election Day and the Creation of Social Capital in the City of Philadelphia - Mark Brewin 3 Community Advocacy and Volunteerism in Wissahickon Park, 1895-2005 - David R. Contosta and Carol L. Franklin Part II: Social Capital in Urban Education 4 Leveraging Social Capital: The University as Educator and Broker - Barbara Ferman 5 Community-Based Education in West Philadelphia: The Promise and Limits of Social Capital Production - Melina Patterson Part III: Neighborhood-Based Social Capital and Local Institutions 6 Credit Unions and Social Capital in Philadelphia - Michael Janson 7 The Comparative Disadvantage of African American-Owned Enterprises: Ethnic Succession and Social Capital in Black Communities - Jennifer Lee 8 Whose Social Capital? How Economic Development Projects Disrupt Local Social Relations - Judith Goode and Robert T. O'Brien 9 Rootedness, Isolation, and Social Capital in an Inner-City White Neighborhood - Patricia Stern Smallacombe 10 Wellsprings of Social Capital: African American Churchwomen in Philadelphia - Valeria Harvell Conclusion: The Declining Political Value of Social Capital - Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg

Review: Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia, edited by Richardson Dilworth. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2006. 256 pages. $27.95 (paperback)

Review: Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia, edited by Richardson Dilworth. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2006. 256 pages. $27.95 (paperback)

Italian Markets: Real Estate and Ethnic Community in Toronto and Philadelphia, 1940-1990

Italian Markets: Real Estate and Ethnic Community in Toronto and Philadelphia, 1940-1990

Small Learning Communities That Actually Learn: Lessons for School Leaders

Collaborative communities of teachers have great potential for bringing about improvements in teaching and learning. But, as Mr. Supovitz and Ms. Christman found in their study of teacher communities in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, simply creating a community structure is not enough to change practice significantly. EDUCATION reformers have increasingly invested in developing collaborative communities within schools as a central strategy for improving teaching and student learning. This strategy comes in various guises, including small schools, small learning communities, and teacher teams. Several assumptions about how these communities will enhance instruction underlie the push for these more collaborative learning environments. Supporters assume that teachers will get to know their students and respond to their needs better. There is also the expectation that small communities will make it easier for teachers to share practices and will encourage them to create a culture for sustained instructional improvement, which will in turn enhance student learning. Are these hopeful assumptions warranted? Our work evaluating small community initiatives during the late 1990s in two urban districts, Philadelphia and Cincinnati, suggests that the key to widespread improvement in student learning through teacher collaboration is the formation of communities of instructional practice that are focused on improving the instructional core of schooling. District and school leaders must provide these communities with the necessary structures, strategies, and support to help teachers hone their instructional craft knowledge. The structures of the reforms in Philadelphia and Cincinnati were different, but their purposes were similar. Participating schools in Cincinnati featured small teams of three to five teachers working with students over multiple years. Small learning communities in Philadelphia, essentially schools within schools, consisted of larger groups of teachers working with students over several years. In both cases, reform leaders believed that teachers would benefit from the collective knowledge of their peers and form deeper, sustained relationships with students and their parents, thus becoming better equipped to meet students' learning needs. Furthermore, while reform leaders in both cities recognized that the new learning communities would need support, they believed that the new structures could flourish within existing school and district organizations. Our examination of the reforms showed these beliefs, typical of advocates for small communities, to be largely invalid. Both reforms did influence school environments positively. In Philadelphia, teachers felt their schools to be safer and more orderly, partly because learning community coordinators monitored student behavior and followed up with parents. In addition, students felt more connected to their learning communities and wanted to show respect. Because of these improvements in the working environment, the reforms were extremely popular with teachers in both cities. Yet in neither locale did these improvements alone translate into greater instructional focus. In Philadelphia, each learning community had a unifying theme that provided opportunities for its teachers to plan and teach intellectually engaging units of study together. However, themes were most often addressed through isolated events, such as field trips and special assemblies, that did nothing to promote the intended collaboration around instruction. In Cincinnati, no significant differences in instructional practices appeared between team-based schools and other schools in the district. The reforms in these two cities failed to increase instructional focus, largely because the learning communities did not spend enough time discussing instruction. As one Cincinnati team member put it, Team issues are administrative, not academic. It has nothing to do with planning instruction. …

Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene

Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene Edited by Charles E. Rosenberg (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) (236 pages; $40.00 cloth) Is the focus of historical research of the healing arts changing? History of science scholar Charles Rosenberg may be suggesting just that. In the introduction to his latest book, Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene, Rosenberg writes, Younger scholars have cultivated a vigorous interest in the perspective and experience of patients and everyday practitioners-lay people and alternative providers as well as mainstream physicians(p. vii). Perhaps one of the largest gaps today in the history of the healing arts-medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and complementary therapies-is the dearth of organized descriptive data on the experience of the American patient. Right Living explores the self-help practices of nineteenth-century Americans through the lens of the popular health publications of the period that guided self-help The publications included are advice books, almanacs, pamphlets, receipt books, and broadsides. Nineteenth-century America, in particular the antebellum period, is often considered the peak of the American advice book movement. Advice books and self-help were not new to Anglo-Americans, however. They brought their cultural tradition of self-care networking through personal interaction and print from Europe. It is the American expression of this cultural tradition that is the focus of Right Living, and this is what readers may find to be the most intriguing. Rosenberg identifies early American self-help sources written for the public as a relatively neglected if richly diverse body of printed materials (p. vii). Although there are numerous historical almanacs, self-help books, and sickroom management guides to be explored, Right Living provides the best evidence for the historian interested in exploring American self-help practices in print literature, since the 1981 text by Anita and Michael Fellman, Making Sense of Self: Medical Advice Literature in Late Nineteenth-Century America.1 Rosenberg organizes the nine chapters of Right Living Into three themes of self-help publications: the shaping and transmission of older English and continental tradition, the persistent interest of the public in health issues related to sexual relations, childbearing, and child rearing, and practice. Though all three areas are significant to the understanding of the social and health-care history of early American culture, the chapters of most importance to scholars of nursing history may be those on domestic practice, in particular the chapter by Kathleen Brown. The subject of Brown's chapter is The Maternal Physician,2 written by Mary Hunt Palmer Tyler in 1811, which is a vivid description of Tyler's work as a nineteenth-century woman healer (nurse?). It provides insight into women's self-care practices, such as healing networks and the receipt book tradition of sharing healing remedies. In addition, it offers recommendations for nursing care and cleanliness. Brown also includes in her analysis an exceptional example of American women's healing culture in the receipt book of Philadelphia community healer Elizabeth Paschall. This chapter is an exciting read for any historian interested in women healers' contributions to the health-care culture of the period. …

Youth Civic Engagement in Practice: The Youth VOICES Program

Youth Civic Engagement in Practice:The Youth VOICES Program Barbara Ferman (bio) For one full week in June 2004, over 65 people, mostly between the ages of 14 and 24, attended the Philadelphia Community School for Community Organizing. The goal of the Philadelphia Community School was to create a space where youth and adults could engage in critical dialogue around key social justice issues. Workshops, reflection periods, neighborhood tours and social activities were used to stimulate intense discussion around issues such as institutional racism, militarism, youth oppression, sexism/homophobia, poetry and art for social change, and the like. Facilitated by youth, community organizers, artists and teachers, the various workshops introduced participants to ideas and tools for organizing in their communities to combat the various forms of oppression that often go unnoticed in their daily lives. Representing a cross section of Philadelphia's population, workshop participants and facilitators were African American, Latino, Asian and white. For a six week period in July and August 2004, 10 high school aged youth, under the guidance of 4 Temple university students, designed, administered and then analyzed the results of a survey of youth in Philadelphia to learn what kinds of services, programs and activities they would like to see in their neighborhoods and in the city. These survey results were combined with results of focus groups, brainstorming sessions, workshops and retreats conducted over a several month period prior to the summer activities. This work was used to develop the first citywide youth philanthropy program in Philadelphia. Under the auspices of the Philadelphia Foundation, Youthadelphia, a name selected by the youth, features a youth board that develops the Request For Proposal, markets the program to youth around the city, reviews proposals and makes funding decisions. This board has $100,000 a year to allocate for youth programs in Philadelphia. These two projects are part of the Youth VOICES program, a youth civic engagement initiative of the University Community Collaborative of Philadelphia, housed at Temple University.1 Serving approximately 150 youth, aged 14–21, per year, in after-school, community-based settings and in an intensive 6 week Summer Academy, the Youth VOICES program is but one example of how universities can effectively engage the larger community. It also illustrates how young people, when provided with the appropriate mix of supports and opportunities, will take on challenging projects with the hope of improving their communities and their worlds. VOICES will be discussed in more detail, but first, let's take a cursory look at the larger context of youth civic engagement — what are the concerns commonly expressed? What are some of the alternative perspectives on the topic? The article will conclude with a discussion of why the university as an institution is, in many ways, ideally situated to develop the kinds of youth civic engagement programs that we believe will be the most effective for developing the skills, values and attitudes that genuine civic engagement requires.2 Alarm Bells Sound During the last decade we have been bombarded with cries of alarm about our civic health; we are told that high school students are not well informed in the ways of American government, that college students are volunteering more but voting less, and that Americans of all stripes are "bowling alone."3 This alleged crisis in our collective civic psyche has been met with a plethora of policies and programs designed to develop the requisite knowledge and qualities for living in a democratic society. Programs like Service Learning and Character Education, to name two, have grown like forests on the educational and policy landscapes. But do these programs and policies address the alleged crisis in civic and democratic values? Is there a crisis in the first place? And, if so, whose crisis is it? There is a wealth of data demonstrating that Americans are more turned off to government and politics now than in the past, a predisposition that is particularly acute among younger cohorts. A series of recent surveys revealed the following: sixty-eight percent of 18–34 year-olds felt completely disconnected from government; a mere 26% of 15–24 year-olds rated "being involved in democracy and voting" as extremely important; and, the...

The history of neurosurgery at Temple University.

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY'S NEUROSURGERY program has had a colorful and distinguished history since its creation in 1929. It has always functioned under challenging circumstances with limited resources but with a strong sense of mission. It was one of the 20 neurosurgical training programs in existence when the American Board of Neurosurgery was founded in 1940. Over the past 64 years, the program has trained approximately the same number of neurosurgeons, many of whom have contributed significantly to our specialty. Some of the advances pioneered in part at Temple include clinical hypothermia (Fay), the biplanar stereoscopic angiographic unit (Chamberlain), human stereotactic surgery (Spiegel and Wycis), lumboperitoneal shunts (Scott), posterior lumbar interbody fusion (Lin), microsurgery for acoustic tumors (Buchheit), and new pharmacological approaches to neuroprotectors (Strauss and Narayan). The Temple neurosurgery program has survived many challenges in the past and will no doubt weather the current financial and medicolegal challenges that confront the neurosurgical community in Philadelphia. It remains a strong clinical program that serves an otherwise underserved community and attracts patients beyond its geographic area because of its strong clinical reputation and the excellence of its clinical faculty and residents.

Tally of Nonprofits

Identification of nonprofit organizations in a study area is often a first step in research or action projects. This article demonstrates the usefulness of combining two data sources: IRS 990 forms and municipal files on tax-exempt real property. A case study for a community in Philadelphia illustrates how merger of the two files expands the information base. Limitations and difficulties in applying this strategy are discussed, but the gain in combining the two sources is substantial.

Evaluating cumulative risk assessment for environmental justice: a community case study.

A key feature of cumulative risk assessment (CRA) is the ability to estimate differential health risks from environmental exposures within populations. Identifying populations at increased risk from environmental exposures is the first step toward mitigating such risks as required by the fair treatment mandate of environmental justice. CRA methods remain under development except for a limited application in pesticide regulations. The goals of this research were to advance CRA methods and to test their application in a community case study. We compared cumulative risk and health assessments for South and Southwest Philadelphia communities. The analysis found positive correlations between cumulative risk and mortality measurements for total mortality in Whites and non-Whites when we conducted the risk assessment using a multi-end point toxicological database developed for this project. Cumulative risk scores correlated positively with cause-specific mortality in non-Whites. Statistically significant increases in total and respiratory mortality rates were associated with incremental increases in the hazard ratio cumulative risk scores, with ranges of 2-6% for total and 8-23% for respiratory. Regression analyses controlled for percent non-White population and per capita income, indicating that risk scores represent an environmental effect on health independent of race and income. This case study demonstrated the successful application of CRA at the community level. CRA adds a health dimension to pollutant concentrations to produce a more comprehensive understanding of environmental inequities that can inform decision making. CRA is a viable tool to identify high-risk areas and to guide surveillance, research, or interventions.

An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia.

When Hahnemann Medical College was founded in Philadelphia in 1848, it was the only institution in the world to offer an M. D. degree in homeopathy, a therapeutic and intellectual alternative to orthodox medicine. This institutional history situates Hahnemann in the broader context of American social changes and chronicles its continual remaking in response to the rise of corporate medicine and constant changes in the Philadelphia community. In the nineteenth century, Hahnemann provided a distinctive and respected identity for its faculty, students, and supporters. In the early twentieth century, it accepted students denied admission elsewhere, especially Jewish and Italian students. It taught a flexible homeopathy that facilitated curricular changes remarkably similar to those at the best contemporary orthodox schools, including selective assimilation of the new experimental sciences, laboratory training, experience in the school's own teaching hospital, and a lengthened course of medical study. Hahnemann is no longer homeopathic, although it remained loyal to its alternative heritage long after the 1910 Flexner Report attempted to eliminate alternative medical education in America. Like many other American medical schools, Hahnemann has had its share of problems, financial and otherwise. The civil rights and radical student movements of the 1960s and 70s, however, pushed the College into a more politically conscious view of itself as a health care provider to the inner city and as a producer of health professionals. In 1993, the College merged with another Philadelphia medical school into a single health care and training institution called the Allegheny University of the HealthSciences. Although Hahnemann is now part of a new system of academic medicine, its institutional legacy endures, as it has in the past, by following alternative paths.

Rachmiel Peltz, From immigrant to ethnic culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xix, 263. Hb $49.50, pb $18.95.

South Philadelphia can be added to the littered landscape of Jewish geography, in which Chelm, Belz, Odessa, Boiberik, and Brownsville are terrain abandoned by Jews. They are romanticized in folk songs, but they make poor real estate investments. Similarly, Yiddish cultural life may be seen as a landscape of outmoded lifeways. The Yiddish language and its dialects have been cast off, but at the same time they remain cherished in memory. Peltz's ethnography explores Yiddish as it survives among what is left of a Yiddish-speaking community in Philadelphia. The story of Yiddish is one of powerlessness; Peltz takes us to the seemingly marginal Jews, the yidelekh – working-class, elderly women and men who are marginalized as a function of their old age, their accents, and their lack of higher education.

Violent injuries among women in an urban area.

Although the rate of death from injuries due to violent acts is much higher among black women than among white women in the United States, little is known about the nature and correlates of violent injuries among black women living in urban areas. In this case-control study conducted at three emergency departments in one inner-city community (in west Philadelphia), we studied 405 adolescent girls and women who had been intentionally injured and 520 adolescent girls and women (control subjects) who had health problems not related to violent injury. Data were collected by conducting standardized interviews with use of questionnaires and by screening urine for illicit drugs. Individual logistic-regression models were constructed to identify factors associated with violent injuries inflicted by partners and those inflicted by persons other than the partners of the victims. The male partners of the injured women were much more likely than the male partners of control subjects to use cocaine (odds ratio, 4.4; 95 percent confidence interval, 2.3 to 8.4) and to have been arrested in the past (odds ratio, 3.1; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.8 to 5.2). Fifty-three percent of violent injuries to the women had been perpetrated by persons other than their partners. Women's use of illicit drugs and alcohol abuse were factors associated with both violence on the part of partners and violence on the part of other persons. Neighborhood characteristics, including low median income, a high rate of change of residence, and poor education, were independently associated with the risk of violent injuries among women. Women in this urban, low-income community face violence from both partners and other persons. Substance abuse, particularly cocaine use, is a significant correlate of violent injuries. Standard Census data may help identify neighborhoods where women are at high risk for such violence and that would benefit from community-level interventions.

West Mount Airy, Philadelphia

West Mount Airy, a neighborhood in the northwest section of Philadelphia, has achieved national acclaim as a model of stable racial integration. The paucity of such examples renders each one important for the lessons that can be learned. The experience of West Mount Airy is even more illuminating when examined in the context of the adjacent communities in northwest Philadelphia. Large portions of East Mount Airy and Germantown, which began as all-White communities, have resegregated to predominantly African-American communities, while Chestnut Hill has retained much of its enclave character as home to some of the city's wealthiest White families. Roxborough and Manayunk, which are separated from West Mount Airy by the Wissahickon Creek and the surrounding Wissahickon Valley of Fairmount Park, are largely White middle-class and working-class communities, respectively. Exhibit 1 illustrates the racial patterns in these neighborhoods between 1950 and 1990. Exhibit 2 provides 1990 racial data for these neighborhoods. Given this particular configuration, the question of how West Mount Airy created and maintained a racially and, to a lesser extent, economically diverse community becomes quite interesting and important.