Behavioral and Educational Achievement Trajectories of Children and Adolescents: The Effect of Home and School Neighborhoods

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

In studies of elementary and middle school students, low resource neighborhoods are associated with poorer emotional and behavioral adjustment as well as decreases in math and reading scores. Disruptive behavioral disorders and academic difficulties are part of a cyclical relationship wherein each problem exacerbates the other. These issues do not occur in isolation, but rather unfold in the context of risk and protective factors, such as home, school or neighborhood environments. Neighborhoods represent a particularly important context to explore during this critical period of development as children spend a majority of their time in local surroundings. In both observational and experimental studies, children residing in disadvantaged neighborhoods exhibited higher levels of externalizing and internalizing behaviors. In a study of 5-11 year olds, a 1 standard deviation increase in neighborhood disadvantage resulted in a 2% increase in the probability of meeting the clinical threshold for internalizing problems. Similarly, there is empirical evidence to support neighborhood effects on education outcomes. Studies find that students living in high poverty neighborhoods show lower math and reading achievement, and are more than three times more likely to drop out of school than their peers in advantaged neighborhoods. In one study, researchers found that a $1,000 increase in mean neighborhood income increased years of schooling by about one tenth of a year.

Behavioral and academic outcomes have been explored in relation to neighborhood contexts, but most research conducted on this population ignores selection processes, time, space, and the multiple ecologies to which children belong. The vast majority of studies rely on cross-sectional data and limited conceptualizations of residential neighborhoods, which only characterize children’s contexts at one point in time and grossly ignores other influential spatial contexts. Moreover, most studies only model neighborhood-home or neighborhood-school combinations. Given the high degree of correlation between home, school and neighborhood characteristics, any analysis that omits one of these contexts runs the risk of overstating or misstating the effect of each. This dissertation uses nationally representative, longitudinal survey data, longitudinal propensity scores, and multiple conceptualizations of residential and school neighborhoods to address these gaps and analyze empirical and policy relevant questions about how neighborhood contexts affect child and early adolescent behavioral and educational trajectories.

Author

• Jamie L Humphrey, University of Colorado - Boulder