Relationships Between School Neighborhood Environmental Characteristics and Youths’ Self-Regulation

• In Event: Objective and Subjective Approaches to Examining Neighborhood Environments for Youth Development

Abstract

Research has consistently shown that characteristics of youths’ home and school neighborhoods can influence development across multiple domains including self-regulation (i.e. the ability to regulate one’s behavioral, cognitive, and emotional functioning). However, few studies have focused on the role that the physical characteristics present in youths’ school neighborhoods play in youth development. School environmental characteristics are physical, observable aspects of space including elements of the physical environment (e.g. sidewalk quality), neighborhood disorder (e.g. abandoned business or buildings), safety promotion (e.g. designated school safety zones), crime deterrence (i.e. street light configuration), and community ownership (e.g. graffiti painted over). This study seeks to address this gap in the literature by examining how school environmental characteristics are related to youths’ self-regulatory skills.

Data for this study includes a subset of high school students participating in the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), a longitudinal study following 602 children and their families recruited from seven of the most under-resourced neighborhoods in Chicago. The majority of the study sample (N = 278; Mage = 15.46, SD= .73; 56.1% female) are Black (N = 186) and Latino (N = 75) students who were attending 128 schools in over 60 Chicago neighborhoods in 2016-2017 and who completed a computerized assessment in the spring of 2016. Schools were concentrated in the North Lawndale, Austin, and Garfield Park neighborhoods with a maximum of nine students attending any given school. Schools predominantly served students of color (Mrace= 11.5% white, SD = .21) who were majority lower-income (Mlow-income= 78%, SD = .26).

We used Google Street View (GSV) in combination with the Internet-based School Neighborhood Assessment Protocol (ISNAP) to code the environmental characteristics of each school. ISNAP is a systematic social observation tool previously used to catalog the environmental characteristics of preschools in the New York City area (McCoy, Sabol, Hanno, Odgers, 2019). The coding process involves first creating a boundary around the school grounds and the school neighborhood (as depicted in Figure 1) followed by a virtual walk around the school grounds and neighborhood. A total of 45 (“is there graffiti present anywhere on the school grounds?”) and 66 items (“which of the following types of properties are present in the school neighborhood”) respectively were rated to quantify each school’s environmental characteristics.

The 128 schools in the sample were individually rated by five coders after clear coding procedures were established. Ten percent of the sample was coded by a master coder to establish inter-rater reliability (kappa = .81). Descriptive findings (See table 1 for descriptive statistics on the schools’ environmental characteristics) reveal a large number of schools utilized some form of physical security (e.g. school resource officer, CCTV camera) and that the physical quality of the school neighborhood and grounds differed greatly across the sample (e.g. abandoned buildings present, school building quality). In future analyses, we will explore how to best combine item ratings into scales and then estimate relationships with youths’ self-regulatory skills (assessed via self-report and direct assessment).

Authors

• Kyla Jo Ford, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Nicole Garth, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kassie Gillis-Harry
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sandra Ware, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amanda L. Roy, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author