How Neighborhoods Affect Health, Well-being, and Young People’s Futures

Description:

Among the many potential factors reviewed in this brief, the evidence most consistently points to neighborhood social cohesion, informal social control, spatial mismatch, and exposure to environmental hazards, including violence, as important factors in how neighborhood affects personal outcomes.

Source: Wayne State University [via MacArthur Foundation]

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Measuring ‘neighborhood’: Constructing network neighborhoods

 Abstract:

"This study attempts to measure neighborhood boundaries in a novel way by creating network neighborhoods based on the density of social ties among adolescents. We create valued matrices based on social ties and physical distance between adolescents in the county. We then perform factor analyses on these valued matrices to detect these network neighborhoods. The resulting network neighborhoods show considerable spatial contiguity. We assess the quality of these aggregations by comparing the degree of agreement among residents assigned to the same network neighborhood when assessing various characteristics of their “neighborhood”, along with traditional definitions of neighborhoods from Census aggregations. Our findings suggest that these network neighborhoods are a valuable approach for “neighborhood” aggregation."

Source: U.C. Irvine retrieved from eScholarship repository

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The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community.

Abstract:

Community psychologists are interested in creating contexts that promote both respect for diversity and sense of community. However, recent theoretical and empirical work has uncovered a community-diversity dialectic wherein the contextual conditions that foster respect for diversity often run in opposition to those that foster sense of community. More specifically, within neighborhoods, residential integration provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community. Using agent-based modeling to simulate neighborhoods and neighborhood social network formation, we explore whether the community-diversity dialectic emerges from two principles of relationship formation: homophily and proximity. The model suggests that when people form relationships with similar and nearby others, the contexts that offer opportunities to develop a respect for diversity are different from the contexts that foster a sense of community. Based on these results, we conclude with a discussion of whether it is possible to create neighborhoods that simultaneously foster respect for diversity and sense of community.

Source: Am J Community Psychol. 2013 Nov 6. [Epub ahead of print]- via PUBMed

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