Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment of adolescents, buffered by personality and educational commitment
Introduction
Research on how the neighbourhood in which people live influences their social outcomes increased drastically over the past 25 years, and has led to a wide variety of mechanisms that may explain how neighbourhood effects work (Galster, 2011, Van Ham et al., 2011). However, despite this longstanding interest, the literature is still far from conclusive about the workings of the neighbourhood. Neighbourhood disadvantage has often been linked to individual educational outcomes, with mixed evidence, some finding large or small effects, while others are not able to establish any evidence for the influence of neighbourhoods on educational outcomes (for reviews, see: Dietz, 2002, Jencks and Mayer, 1990, Johnson, 2010, Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn, 2000). This variation in findings points at unmeasured individual characteristics. Heterogeneity of neighbourhood effects has for example been shown for individual characteristics such as being a parent or not, and being in part-time vs. full-time employment (Galster et al., 2010). Another example of characteristics that are commonly used to address diverging neighbourhood effects for different individuals pertains to the family context and the parents. Parenting strategies or parental stress have in some instances been indicated as a pathway between neighbourhood disadvantage and child outcomes (for a review, see: Galster, 2011), although this relation is not found consistently (Nieuwenhuis et al., 2013).
We, however, suggest two commonly unmeasured attributes that pertain more to the individual adolescent, which may lead to different findings in neighbourhood effects research: a resilient personality type and educational commitments. First, people with more resilient personalities might differ substantially in their ability to cope with adverse neighbourhood effects, and second, adolescents might be buffered from negative neighbourhood effects by higher levels of educational commitment. Resilience and educational commitment may explain why some research finds a neighbourhood effect, while others are not able to find significant links.
A second reason for the variation in the findings of neighbourhood effects is the definition of the neighbourhood. Some studies use the district level to measure effects, others take the analyses down to the level of streets or blocks. Smaller delineations are likely to better represent the individually perceived neighbourhood, and might better when a local socialisation mechanism is in effect. However, a larger delineation may be more suitable when the neighbourhood effect is caused by outside stigmatisation and reputation (Kwan, 2012, Oberwittler and Wikström, 2009). We will test which of the two is more apt in identifying neighbourhood effects on educational outcomes.
Section snippets
Theories and hypotheses
We consider two individual attributes that we hypothesise to interact with the neighbourhood effect: personality types and educational commitment. Our specific educational outcome is ‘the timing of obtaining a basic qualification’. This outcome enables us to develop hypotheses about study delay and school dropout. In the following we will first briefly discuss the neighbourhood effects literature on education, and subsequently we will hypothesise why personality type and educational commitment
Data
To test our hypotheses we use several data sources. The six waves of the Conflict and Management of Relationships (Conamore) data are used for individual-level data. For neighbourhood-level information we use data from The Netherlands Institute for Social Research and Statistics Netherlands. The Conamore data are a longitudinal dataset consisting of 1,313 respondents divided into an early-to-middle adolescent cohort (n = 923; 70.3%) who were on average 12.4 years of age at the first wave, and a
Results
To test whether there are differences in individual educational attainment between neighbourhoods with different degrees of disadvantage, we perform a simple log-rank test of equality for survivor functions. We divided neighbourhoods in two groups according to their degree of disadvantage (less than or equal to the mean level of disadvantage, and more than the mean level of disadvantage). This test supports the idea that adolescents in disadvantaged neighbourhoods have less educational success
Conclusion and discussion
The principal aim of this paper was to investigate whether adolescents with different individual traits experience different neighbourhood effects. The main neighbourhood effect we found is that: adolescents residing in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are more likely to need a longer time to obtain a basic qualification than adolescents residing in more advantaged neighbourhoods (H1). Although this finding is not novel, it allows us to test our hypotheses about diverging neighbourhood effects for
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Jeroen Weesie, Maarten van Ham and Rongqin Yu for their help and useful suggestions. Also, we would like to thank the two referees, who provided us with helpful comments.
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