Chapter Four - Why Neighborhoods (and How We Study Them) Matter for Adolescent Development
Introduction
Neighborhoods are central social settings for organizing and experiencing human life. In this chapter, we focus on youth, whose lives are constrained by the housing and neighborhood choices of their parents and are more geographically bound than adults. The growing need for autonomy during adolescence increases the amount of time adolescents spend outside of their home, typically with peers, and often in neighborhoods that provide the physical and social space within which much interaction occurs (Leventhal, Dupéré, & Brooks-Gunn, 2009). Extensive scholarship has linked neighborhood contexts—particularly their socioeconomic characteristics—to various domains of youth development and well-being: violence and delinquency, substance use, sexual activity, child-bearing, high school drop-out, educational attainment, employment, and physical and mental health (e.g., Dupéré et al., 2010, Leventhal et al., 2009, McBride Murry et al., 2011).
Inequalities are readily observed in the physical properties of neighborhoods that reflect and reinforce the existing stratification of social groups whose members have differential access to resources, power, status, and prestige (McLeod, 2013, Squires and Kubrin, 2005, Sundstrom, 2003, p. 84). Thus, the processes that occur in these settings generate—and are sometimes meant to compensate for—problems of social stratification. That is, the social and economic characteristics of youth and their families result in a set of risks and resources that can stem from or interact with their neighborhood environments. Youth and their families are changing over time, but so too are the neighborhoods in which they are located, creating a kind of “dynamism” of shifting opportunities and constraints. Neighborhoods are a primary setting within which life course transitions occur and life trajectories are situated.
US neighborhoods, our focus, are largely shaped by the intersection of three key structural “cleavages”: race/ethnicity, social class, and geography.a Neighborhoods are where these cleavages are most visibly “etched in place” (Sampson, 2012, p. 19), resulting in complex neighborhood “types” defined by “profiles” of characteristics, such as those implied by the terms “distressed,” “privileged,” or “bad” neighborhoods (Leicht & Jenkins, 2007). Yet, traditional “neighborhood effects” research has generally focused on single items (e.g., percent Black) or indices (e.g., of concentrated disadvantage) related to the demographic and/or economic composition of neighborhoods.
Although this work has been instrumental in identifying some of the place-based characteristics that influence development, such a “variable-centered” (Weden, Bird, Escarce, & Lurie, 2011) approach treats the structural cleavages superficially and as if they are independent, thereby ignoring their intersections (Choo & Ferree, 2010) and neglecting how they are complex latent aspects of social structure (Diez Roux and Mair, 2010, Ferraro et al., 2009). These three structural cleavages, independently and jointly, are already powerfully associated with individuals’ life chances (McLeod, 2013), reflecting larger social forces such as discrimination, segregation, stratification, and inequality—processes that systematically put certain social groups at an economic or social disadvantage (Braveman, 2014). This is consistent with an “intersectionality” perspective, which underscores the need to probe the meaning and consequences of multiple categories of difference and disadvantage (McCall, 2005), divisions that are often enmeshed and not reducible to each other (Yuval-Davis, 2006).
In this chapter, we aim to advance theories and measures of neighborhoods as a key developmental context, particularly for youth, via three primary goals. First, we briefly establish adolescence as a key developmental period that unfolds across multiple contexts, with neighborhoods being a focal context. We then provide an overview of the state of research on neighborhood effects and describe the advantages of bridging current approaches with more macrosociological stratification theories in order to illuminate the three structural cleavages noted earlier and to generate an integrated perspective.
Second, we outline how a “neighborhood-centered” approach offers an alternative and effective means for studying the effects of neighborhoods on adolescent development and trajectories into adulthood. This approach permits the simultaneous consideration of multiple forms of inequality and a relational, comparative investigation of neighborhoods.
Third, to demonstrate the power of a neighborhood-centered approach, we draw on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to examine how trajectories of violent victimization during adolescence and into young adulthood differ across neighborhood types, and how neighborhoods shape victimization behaviors directly and indirectly.
Section snippets
Adolescent Development and the Life Course: An Orienting Note
Adolescence is a sensitive developmental period marked by significant biological, physiological, psychological, and social changes. It is characterized by increasing independence from parents and family, salience of friendships and peer groups, exploration of identity, and experimentation with a wide range of behaviors, some of which can be risky (e.g., Smetana, Campione-Barr, & Metzger, 2006). Scholarship on adolescent development has been consistently attuned to matters of risk and resilience
A Brief History of Sociological Scholarship on Neighborhood Effects
Serious attention to persons in places—and to the influence of place on human development—can be traced to the early contextual thinkers of the Chicago School (particularly, Burgess, 1925, Park, 1936, Wirth, 1945). These scholars were concerned with understanding everyday human life in relation to the social world, and they used human ecology as the guiding framework for identifying the social forces that organize persons and institutions in a given social space (Gross, 2004). In one of the
Shifting Back Upstream
Current research on neighborhoods as contexts of development remains largely grounded in a social disorganization framework and on the concepts, models, and mechanisms described previously. Although significant advancements have been made by researchers in these directions, one perhaps unintended result of this “social process turn” (Browning, Cagney, & Boettner, 2016) is the movement of neighborhoods research “downstream,” away from the “upstream” macrolevel factors that shape neighborhoods in
A Neighborhood-Centered Approach
Because race/ethnicity and social class covary so strongly in the United States, neighborhood effects research tends to discuss their effects in tandem (Sucoff & Upchurch, 1998, p. 573). For example, the percentage of Black residents in an area is often used as an indicator of socioeconomic disadvantage, or it is combined with other measures such as the poverty rate, because these measures are highly correlated (Land, McCall, & Cohen, 1990). Despite this, racial/ethnic and social class
Trajectories of Adolescent Violent Victimization Across Neighborhood Types
To more fully introduce a “neighborhood-centered” approach, we illustrate how LCA can embrace the intersection of race/ethnicity, class, and geography, and how a neighborhood-centered approach permits the exploration of neighborhood effects across multiple geographies. Specifically, we explore the extent to which adolescent violent victimization is embedded in and shaped by neighborhood context.
Discussion and Conclusion
We introduced and advanced a “neighborhood-centered” approach to the study of adolescent development and behavior, integrating developmental perspectives with macrosociological theories of place stratification and the life course. This is an important endeavor, given the magnitude of influence of neighborhoods on adolescents, whose lives are geographically constrained, and given how entangled neighborhood effects are with family, school, and peer influences.
The neighborhood-centered approach
Acknowledgments
This research uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by Grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special
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