Cross-sectional and longitudinal measurements of neighborhood experience and their effects on children

Abstract

Despite the abundance of research on neighborhoods' effects on children, most studies of neighborhood effects are cross-sectional, rendering them unable to depict the dynamic nature of social life, and obscuring important aspects of community processes and outcomes. This study uses residential histories from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey and the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore two questions: 1) How much do residential mobility and neighborhood change contribute to the overall socioeconomic variation in children's neighborhoods? 2) Does measuring community factors at more than one point in time matter for the conclusions that we draw from research on "neighborhood effects" on children's behavioral, cognitive and health-related well-being? Residential mobility plays a non-trivial role over the period of childhood in determining children's exposure to neighborhoods of different economic types. However, quantitative estimates of neighborhood effects that allow neighborhood characteristics to vary through residential mobility and neighborhood change do not depict a strikingly different picture from cross-sectional estimates. Children do not experience enough variation in their local surroundings to produce meaningful differences between static and dynamic measurements of neighborhoods. We also uncover interesting regional and race/ethnic differences in neighborhood dynamics and neighborhood effects.

Neighborhood Social Capital, Neighborhood Disadvantage, and Change of Neighborhood as Predictors of School Readiness

“…In earlier decades of the last century, low-income neighborhoods in immigrant-receiving cities of North America were dominated by European immigrants, many of whom retained their original cultures, languages, and religious practices for at least one or two generations before they and their offspring or grandchildren became fully assimilated. The US literature has focused on the increasing concentration of minority residents, largely African-Americans, in the most impoverished areas of the nation's metropolises from the 1960s [34]. By contrast, Canadian cities have traditionally included immigrant neighborhoods occupied in various decades by Chinese, Haitians, Hungarians, Italians, Jamaicans, Japanese, Jews, Irish, Koreans, Latin Americans, Pakistanis, Poles, Portuguese, Somalis, Tamils, Ukrainians, Vietnamese among others [35].…”

Residential Mobility Across Local Areas in the United States and the Geographic Distribution of the Healthy Population

“…aggregate respondents residing in high-poverty areas across the nation and, thus, cannot focus on geographically defined local environmental exposures. Recent investigations on the longitudinal effects of neighborhood stratification on educational or developmental outcomes in children have used this aggregated approach (Jackson and Mare 2007;Wodke et al 2011).…”

Construction and Validation of an Observational Scale of Neighborhood Characteristics

“…Neighborhoods are complex, dynamic settings, introducing a good deal of uncertainty to the selection of robust, theoretically grounded measures. Neighborhoods are in a constant state of flux, often making it difficult to operationally define constructs of interest, especially in longterm studies (Jackson and Mare 2007;Spielman and Yoo 2009) The challenge in hitting a moving target is the likelihood of residual confounding, although such statistical practices as propensity score analysis provide a strategy for at least partially addressing the issue (Diez Roux 2004;Trojano et al 2009). …”