▪ Abstract This paper assesses and synthesizes the cumulative results of a new “neighborhood-effects” literature that examines social processes related to problem behaviors and health-related outcomes. Our review identified over 40 relevant studies published in peer-reviewed journals from the mid-1990s to 2001, the take-off point for an increasing level of interest in neighborhood effects. Moving beyond traditional characteristics such as concentrated poverty, we evaluate the salience of social-interactional and institutional mechanisms hypothesized to account for neighborhood-level variations in a variety of phenomena (e.g., delinquency, violence, depression, high-risk behavior), especially among adolescents. We highlight neighborhood ties, social control, mutual trust, institutional resources, disorder, and routine activity patterns. We also discuss a set of thorny methodological problems that plague the study of neighborhood effects, with special attention to selection bias. We conclude with promising ...

ASSESSING "NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS": Social Processes and New Directions in Research

This article provides a comprehensive review of research on the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent well-being. The first section reviews key methodological issues. The following section considers links between neighborhood characteristics and child outcomes and suggests the importance of high socioeconomic status (SES) for achievement and low SES and residential instability for behavioral/emotional outcomes. The third section identifies 3 pathways (institutional resources, relationships, and norms/collective efficacy) through which neighborhoods might influence development, and which represent an extension of models identified by C. Jencks and S. Mayer (1990) and R. J. Sampson (1992). The models provide a theoretical base for studying neighborhood mechanisms and specify different levels (individual, family, school, peer, community) at which processes may operate. Implications for an emerging developmental framework for research on neighborhoods are discussed. Social science concerns about the effects of residence in a poor neighborhood on children and youth date back more than 50 years to the publication of Shaw and McKay's (1942) Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Historical accounts of the effects of living in a poor neighborhood date back even further. The current interest in neighborhood effects on, children and youth has multiple origins. First, Wilson's (1987) documentation of increasingly concentrated poverty in urban areas at the neighborhood level during the 1970s and 1980s served to reorient discussions of poverty from the individual to the neighborhood level. Second, and related to the work of Wilson, was the rejuvenated interest among sociologists and urban scholars in community social disorganization theory (Shaw & McKay, 1942) as an explanatory model for delinquency and crime, as well as other problem behaviors encountered in many poor urban neighborhoods (see, e.g., Bursik, 1988; Kornhauser, 1978; Sampson, 1992; Sampson & Groves, 1989; see Sampson & Morenoff, 1997, for a review). Social disorganization theory posits that neighborhood structural factors, such as poverty, residential instability, single parenthood, and ethnic heterogeneity, are of prime importance in explaining behavior through their ability to thwart or promote neighborhood organization (formal and informal institutions), which maintains public order. Other scholars, although not necessarily focusing on child wellbeing, drew attention to residential (or spacial) patterns as sources

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The neighborhoods they live in: the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent outcomes.

WHO Violence cuts short the lives of millions of people across the world each year, and damages the lives of millions more. It knows no boundaries of geography, race, age or income. It strikes at children, young people, women and the elderly. It finds its way into homes, schools and the workplace. Men and women everywhere have the right to live their lives and raise their children free from the fear of violence. We must help them enjoy that right by making it clearly understood that violence is preventable, and by working together to identify and address its underlying causes.

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World report on violence and health

Neighborhood Environments: Disparities in Access to Healthy Foods in the U.S.

http://library.um.ac.id/free-contents/downloadpdf.php/buku/focus-groups-as-qualitative-research-by-morgan-david-l-11476.pdf

Focus groups as qualitative research / by Morgan, David L.

Using census and administrative agency data for 177 urban census tracts, variation in rates of officially reported child maltreatment is found to be related to structural determinants of community social organization: economic and family resources, residential instability, household and age structure, and geographic proximity of neighborhoods to concentrated poverty. Furthermore, child maltreatment rates are found to be intercorrelated with other indicators of the breakdown of community social control and organization. These other indicators are similarly affected by the structural dimensions of neighborhood context. Children who live in neighborhoods that are characterized by poverty, excessive numbers of children per adult resident, population turnover, and the concentration of female-headed families are at highest risk of maltreatment. This analysis suggests that child maltreatment is but one manifestation of community social organization and that its occurrence is related to some of the same underlying macro-social conditions that foster other urban problems.

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Community level factors and child maltreatment rates

How Neighborhoods Influence Child Maltreatment: A Review of the Literature and Alternative Pathways.

Neighborhood influences on children and youth are the subjects of increasing numbers of studies, but there is concern that these investigations may be biased, because they typically rely on census-based units as proxies for neighborhoods. This pilot study tested several methods of defining neighborhood units based on maps drawn by residents, and compared the results with census definitions of neighborhoods. When residents' maps were used to create neighborhood boundary definitions, the resulting units covered different space and produced different social indicator values than did census-defined units. Residents' agreement about their neighborhoods' boundaries differed among the neighborhoods studied. This pilot study suggests that discrepancies between researcher and resident-defined neighborhoods are a possible source of bias in studies of neighborhood effects.

Mapping residents' perceptions of neighborhood boundaries: a methodological note.

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/epi/Coulton99.pdf

Neighborhoods and child maltreatment: a multi-level study.

Communities have long been recognized as potentially important contexts for child development (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, Moen, & Garbarino, 1984; Cicchetti & Lynch, 1993). Recent interest in measuring these contexts has been spawned by concern about neighborhood decline. Dramatic industrial restructuring and continuing patterns of racial segregation have given rise in the last two decades to a growing geographic concentration of poverty and isolation of poor families from mainstream influences (Jargowsky & Bane, 1991; Kasarda, 1993). Many inner-city neighborhoods have experienced social transformations in which single-parent families live amidst the highest rates of violence, drug trafficking, and housing deterioration. Their children experience increasing rates of delinquency, school failure, and developmental problems (Wilson, 1987). Concurrently, scientific interest in documenting the effects of urban communities on children and families is being renewed but has been hampered by limited methodologies for measuring aspects of neighborhood contexts that are relevant to parents and their young children.

Jill E. Korbin

Papers

Community level factors and child maltreatment rates

How Neighborhoods Influence Child Maltreatment: A Review of the Literature and Alternative Pathways.

Mapping residents' perceptions of neighborhood boundaries: a methodological note.

Neighborhoods and child maltreatment: a multi-level study.

Measuring neighborhood context for young children in an urban area