Staying Out of Trouble: Neighborhood Influences on Adolescent Problem Behavior

In this research, I consider how objective and perceived neighborhood quality affect adolescent problem behavior. I focus on three main questions: (1) Does living in stressful neighborhoods cause adolescents to be more likely to take risks? (2) Do some neighborhoods contribute to adolescent problem behaviors by exacerbating the effects of family-level stressors and inadequate maternal resources? (3) How does the adolescent's attitudinal orientation in turn influence their likelihood of engaging in problem behavior? To address these questions, I merge data from the 1990 Census and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) Merged Mother-Child files to form a sample of 860 adolescents aged 14 to 18 in 1994. Neighborhood attributes have strong effects on adolescent outcomes. In particular, a clear factor that helps adolescents to stay out of trouble is living in more residentially stable communities. Residential stability decreases both adolescent risk-taking attitudes and aggressive behavior. One of the more compelling findings of this research is that the protective effect of residential stability persists regardless of the level of disadvantage present within the community. The quality of schools that adolescents attend also has strong protective effects. Higher quality schools are environments in which adolescents are less likely to get into trouble, even controlling for attributes of the adolescent's family situation. From a policy perspective, this is a particularly important finding as it counters the argument that schools cannot effectively help adolescents without substantial family support