Deborah Gorman-Smith, Patrick Tolan, David Henry, and Michael Schoeny, Principal Investigators
2009

The purpose of this study is to develop, pilot, and validate a set of theoretically implicated and empirically based measures of neighborhood social processes thought to be important in understanding risk and protection for youth violence. Research over the last 20 years has brought attention to the importance of contextual influences on risk for youth violence, and has clearly demonstrated that rates of youth violence vary across different neighborhood types. Although this research has clearly established that “neighborhoods matter,” our understanding of how they matter or the processes through which neighborhoods relate to risk and protection remains unclear.

This study applies an ecological view of and a developmental emphasis on the influence on youth of violence risk, including the structural and social characteristics affecting neighborhoods as critical influences on risk for youth violence. Central to this developmental approach is the importance of families as key, ongoing mediators of other influences as well as their direct relation to risk and protection. The goal of this work is to advance the theoretical consistency and predictive utility of these measures to permit developmental understanding of neighborhood influence on families and children that can then better direct violence prevention efforts. This study is intended to bring development of children—within families—into the conception, construction, and refinement of measurement of neighborhood social processes.

Building from the existing research and measurement efforts on structural characteristics and social processes of neighborhoods, with specific attention to the meaning of these for supporting or hindering healthy development as managed by families, and focused on risk and protection of youth violence, the research team will develop a theoretically coherent set of measures that can improve the ability to explain, predict, and inform prevention efforts targeting youth violence. To do so, we will collect data from two samples for measurement development and validation, each drawn from the same set of neighborhoods: 1) a neighborhood informant sample that comprises 10 adolescents and caregivers and 10 other unrelated adults from each neighborhood as sources for neighborhood-level construct measurement and refinement; and 2) an individual outcomes sample that comprises 10 parent and child pairs from families in which the oldest child is between ages 5 and 6 (school entry) and 10 parent and child pairs from families in which the oldest child is between ages 14 and 18 (adolescence) from each of these same neighborhoods. The two samples will be used to estimate neighborhood characteristics and processes thought to affect youth violence risk (norms, social support and connection, social control, and routine activities; at the neighborhood and individual level). The individual outcomes sample will also be used to evaluate the predictive validity of neighborhood measures for risk and protection of violence victimization and perpetration.

The specific aims of this study are:

1. To develop and refine measures and methods of measurement of important social processes (norms, social support and connection, social control, and routine activities) that theory and prior research indicate are related to risk and protection of youth violence.

2. To validate these neighborhood-level measures through evaluation of the relation of these characteristics to neighborhood level of youth violence and school performance.

3. To test the specific contribution of each construct as measured by the neighborhood informant sample to individual risk for violence victimization and perpetration and to evaluate neighborhood risk as a moderator of family effects on child aggression and violence, school functioning, and other indicators of child social functioning.

4. To test the variation in explanatory role of each construct to risk at two distinct developmental stages— adolescence and school entry.

5. To test the relation between community structural characteristics (e.g., poverty, mobility, economic viability) and neighborhood social processes and how variation in that relation explains youth risk for violence, family functioning, and other theorized moderators of neighborhood risk for individuals.