Community Influence on Adolescent Development

Capturing what encompasses “community” in the lives of adolescents presents a continuing challenge for both researchers and interventionalists. Community often represents an amorphous influence on the lives of adolescence. Depending on the purpose, community has been defined as a geographic locality or as a group of individuals who share common goals. For the purposes of this chapter, we cast a wide net with our definition of community to capture the complex and intertwined ecological influences that create shared bonds and experiences among adolescents. Our definition of community encompasses multiple factors that shape the culture of adolescence. We draw on Bronfenbrenner's (1979, 1995) ecological theory, which emphasizes the importance of social contexts in the study of the influence of the community on the adolescent. Contexts such as schools, churches, the workplace, race/ethnicity, and the policy climate represent important influences, but reviewing all aspects of the community is beyond the scope of this chapter. As such, we have selected three components of the community to demonstrate various proximal and distal influences affecting adolescents: (1) peers, (2) neighborhoods, and (3) media. We present a selective review of the literature related to these topics in order to highlight the critical role that community contexts play in adolescent development. We begin by providing a brief overview of Bronfenbrenner's person-process-context model as a foundation for discussing community influence.