Neighborhood Effects Literature Research Articles

Collective Efficacy as a Task Specific Process: Examining the Relationship Between Social Ties, Neighborhood Cohesion and the Capacity to Respond to Violence, Delinquency and Civic Problems

In the neighborhood effects literature, collective efficacy is viewed as the key explanatory process associated with the spatial distribution of a range of social problems. While many studies usefully focus on the consequences of collective efficacy, in this paper we examine the task specificity of collective efficacy and consider the individual and neighborhood factors that influence residents' perceptions of neighborhood collective efficacy for specific tasks. Utilizing survey and administrative data from 4,093 residents nested in 148 communities in Australia, we distinguish collective efficacy for particular threats to social order and assess the relative importance of social cohesion and neighborhood social ties to the development of collective efficacy for violence, delinquency and civic/political issues. Our results indicate that a model separating collective efficacy for specific problems from social ties and the more generalized notions of social cohesion is necessary when understanding the regulation potential of neighborhoods.

Examining Neighbourhood and School Effects Simultaneously

Neighbourhoods and schools are two contexts in which youth spend vast amounts of their time—making friends, forming opinions and attitudes, and learning the social and academic skills that help them navigate through life. In the neighbourhood effects literature, schools are theorised to be a pathway or mechanism of the neighbourhood’s influence on children and youth. We tested this hypothesis using a longitudinal dataset of 9897 secondary school students. We estimated school and neighbourhood effects separately, and then considered youths’ simultaneous membership in both contexts. In the latter analysis, the associations between neighbourhood characteristics and achievement were reduced to non-significance, while the associations with the school context remained strong and significant. These results point to schools as a pathway through which the influence of the neighbourhood may be transmitted, and underscore the need for better conceptualisations of the mutiple and interrelated contexts that youth inhabit.

Understanding Neighbourhood Effects: Selection Bias and Residential Mobility

The number of studies investigating neighbourhood effects has increased rapidly over the last two decades. Although many of these studies claim to have found evidence for neighbourhood effects, most 'evidence' is likely the result of reversed causality. The main challenge in modelling neighbourhood effects is the (econometric) identification of causal effects. The most severe problem is selection bias as a result of selective sorting into neighbourhoods. This paper argues that in order to further our understanding of neighbourhood effects we should explicitly incorporate neighbourhood sorting into our models. Neighbourhood effect studies are in the situation where the processes behind one of its key methodological problems (selection bias) are also critical to fully understand the neighbourhood context itself. It is thus remarkable that residential mobility and neighbourhood sorting has been almost completely ignored in the neighbourhood effects literature.

Neighbourhood Effects, Housing Tenure, and Individual Employment Outcomes

This paper investigates whether individuals living in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of unemployment are less likely to enter work if they are unemployed and more likely to lose their job if they are employed. The main challenge in the neighbourhood effects literature is the identification of causal neighbourhood effects. A particular problem is that individuals do not randomly select neighbourhoods to live in: the selection process is often linked to the labour market situation and potential of individuals. To get more insight in neighbourhood effects we run separate models for social renters and owner occupiers. This study uses anonymised individual level longitudinal data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study for 1991 and 2001 with multiple neighbourhood scales operationalised. Based on the results we argue that any apparent neighbourhoods effects that were present in models of the full population are at least partly an artefact of different neighbourhood selection mechanisms. The conclusions of the paper call for a more nuanced treatment of neighbourhood effects and the development of models that seek to include neighbourhood selection from the outset.

Conceptualization and measurement of the neighborhood in rural settings: a systematic review of the literature

AbstractInterest in the effects of neighborhood context on individual wellbeing has increased in recent years. We now know that neighborhood conditions, such as poverty and deprivation, negatively impact residents. However, most of the extant work has taken an urban focus. Less is known about these processes in rural settings. Neighborhood conceptualizations, such as Census tracts and block groups, are standard in the urban neighborhood effects literature. Yet, rural neighborhoods differ from those in urban regions making it unclear how these conceptualizations would fit. This systematic review seeks to summarize how researchers have conceptualized and measured rural neighborhoods. Keyword searches were performed in a variety of databases to compile all relevant peer‐reviewed articles. After examination, 19 articles fit the review criteria. Conceptualizations fell into five categories: administrative units, distance from home, town segments, local‐actor mapped regions, and nongeographical self‐definitions. Discussion of the merits of each for rural community research is provided. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Ending the cycle of poverty through socio-economic integration: A comparison of Moving to Opportunity (MTO) in the United States and the Bijlmermeer Revival Project in the Netherlands

In many advanced industrialized countries, one trend in housing programs has been to attempt to reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty and other social problems through the “de-concentration” of urban poverty. In this article, we compare two re-location and urban renewal programs in the United States and the Netherlands, that we argue are based, in part, on assumptions about neighbourhood effects. This neighbourhood effects literature contends that living in close proximity to other impoverished people has a negative effect on the behaviour, dispositions, and welfare of low-income individuals, particularly children. Specifically, this article compares the “Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Experiment” (MTO) in the United States and the “Bijlmermeer Revitalization Project” in the Netherlands. The MTO and Bijlmermeer programs have demonstrated that a multifaceted approach to socio-spatial integration can provide significant social benefits to the poor. At the same time, these projects reveal that re-location policies must take into account these groups’ specific contexts in order to increase the likelihood of desired outcomes through such programs. The goal of reducing concentrations of poverty in urban centres should include opportunities for re-location, while simultaneously working towards the urban renewal of high poverty urban neighbourhoods. We argue that maintaining political and public support for urban poverty de-concentration programs requires further experimental, qualitative and quantitative research aimed at explaining the complex and non-linear relationship between urban concentrations of poverty and social problems. This would also allow for targeting of de-concentration efforts to improve social and economic opportunities for all.

Is segregation bad for your health?

For decades, racial residential segregation has been observed to vary with health outcomes for African Americans, although only recently has interest increased in the public health literature. Utilizing a systematic review of the health and social science literature, the authors consider the segregation-health association through the lens of 4 questions of interest to epidemiologists: How is segregation best measured? Is the segregation-health association socially or biologically plausible? What evidence is there of segregation-health associations? Is segregation a modifiable risk factor? Thirty-nine identified studies test an association between segregation and health outcomes. The health effects of segregation are relatively consistent, but complex. Isolation segregation is associated with poor pregnancy outcomes and increased mortality for blacks, but several studies report health-protective effects of living in clustered black neighborhoods net of social and economic isolation. The majority of reviewed studies are cross-sectional and use coarse measures of segregation. Future work should extend recent developments in measuring and conceptualizing segregation in a multilevel framework, build upon the findings and challenges in the neighborhood-effects literature, and utilize longitudinal data sources to illuminate opportunities for public health action to reduce racial disparities in disease.

Why Organizational Ties Matter for Neighborhood Effects: Resource Access through Childcare Centers

How does neighborhood poverty affect the poor's ability to access resources such as health care and job information? Most studies have focused on individuals or neighborhoods; we focus on organizations - specifically, whether organizations are less connected if located in poor neighborhoods. Our case study is childcare centers. We ask whether centers' organizational ties provide parents access to important resources, and whether neighborhood poverty affects this capacity. Based on qualitative fieldwork in 23 New York City centers, we develop hypotheses about this process. We test them on a representative sample of 293 centers. Findings uncover that centers provide important resource-access through their ties and that neighborhood poverty does not undermine this capacity. We suggest that organizational ties may help explain the inconsistent results of the neighborhood effects literature.

Block, Tract, and Levels of Aggregation: Neighborhood Structure and Crime and Disorder as a Case in Point

This article highlights the importance of considering the proper level of aggregation when estimating neighborhood effects. Using a unique nonrural subsample from a large national survey (the American Housing Survey) at three time points that allows placing respondents in blocks and census tracts, this study tests the appropriate level of aggregation of the structural characteristics hypothesized to affect block-level perceptions of crime and disorder. I find that structural characteristics differ in their effects based on the level of aggregation employed. While the effects of racial/ethnic heterogeneity are fairly robust to the geographical level of aggregation, the stronger effects, when measured at the level of the surrounding census tract, suggest more dispersed networks are important for perceived crime and disorder. In contrast, economic resources only show a localized effect when aggregating to the block-level and differ based on the outcome; higher average income reduces disorder but increases crime, most likely by increasing the number of attractive targets. Additionally, the presence of broken households has a localized effect for social disorder but a more diffuse effect for perceived crime. These findings suggest the need for neighborhood studies of crime rates, as well as the broader neighborhood effects literature, to consider the mechanisms involved when aggregating various structural characteristics.

Toward a neighborhood resource-based theory of social capital for health: Can Bourdieu and sociology help?

Within the past several years, a considerable body of research on social capital has emerged in public health. Although offering the potential for new insights into how community factors impact health and well being, this research has received criticism for being undertheorized and methodologically flawed. In an effort to address some of these limitations, this paper applies Pierre Bourdieu's (1986) [Bourdieu, P. (1986). Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood] social capital theory to create a conceptual model of neighborhood socioeconomic processes, social capital (resources inhered within social networks), and health. After briefly reviewing the social capital conceptualizations of Bourdieu and Putnam, I attempt to integrate these authors’ theories to better understand how social capital might operate within neighborhoods or local areas. Next, I describe a conceptual model that incorporates this theoretical integration of social capital into a framework of neighborhood social processes as health determinants. Discussion focuses on the utility of this Bourdieu-based neighborhood social capital theory and model for examining several under-addressed issues of social capital in the neighborhood effects literature and generating specific, empirically testable hypotheses for future research.

Job Information Networks, Neighborhood Effects, and Inequality

This paper explores the theoretical and empirical literature to examine the use by different social groups of informal sources of information provided by friends, relatives, and acquaintances during job search and its consequences for the job market. It also addresses the role of network structure and size, the resource endowments of contacts, and nature of the links between contacts to explain differences in the effects of job information networks. In doing so, the paper also turns to the sociology literature on job information networks and provides an economic perspective on such sociological concepts as strong versus weak ties, inbreeding, distance from structural holes, etc. The paper distinguishes between models of exogenous job information networks, that is where individuals obtain job-related information through a given social structure, and endogenous job information networks, which are social networks that result from individuals' uncoordinated actions. The paper pays special attention to such issues as physical and social proximity and sharing of information and discusses them in the context of the recent social interactions and neighborhood effects literature. Finally, the paper outlines a model that integrates job information networks, where interactions occur in business cycle frequencies, with the dynamics of human capital formation, which include the joint effects of parental, community and neighborhood human capital, and are set in life cycle frequencies, for the purpose of organizing suggestions for future research and examining earned income inequality.

The estimation of neighborhood effects in the social sciences: An interdisciplinary approach

This paper critically examines the interdisciplinary research of neighborhood effects. Neighborhood effects are community influences on individual social or economic outcomes. Examples include labor force activity, child outcomes, criminal behavior, and other socioeconomic phenomena. The existing theoretical and empirical literature is reviewed. Conceptual definitions from sociology are linked and contrasted with economic models. Early studies are criticized for failing to account for a number of endogeneity concerns. Recent empirical studies are also explored. The results of these papers demonstrate that although neighborhood characteristics are important, their influences are much smaller than suggested by previous research. An additional emphasis is dedicated to linking the neighborhood effects literature to other research of local or spatial activity within economics, sociology, and geography. In particular, the potential employment of local interaction game theory and spatial econometrics in neighborhood effects research is discussed. Additionally, a catalogue of existing empirical research is assembled.