How
Neighborhoods, Families, Peer Groups, and Schools Jointly
Affect Changes in Early Adolescent Development
Thomas
D. Cook, Melissa R. Herman, Meredith Phillips,
and Richard A. Settersten, Jr.
Abstract
This study scales nuclear families, friendship groups,
schools and neighborhoods for their theory-derived capacity to promote
healthy development during early adolescence. We then demonstrate
that the resulting index for each context is associated with 19-month
changes in a multi-dimensional success composite after controls
are used for many individual and aggregate-level selection variables.
We then ask two questions: First, how tightly are the four contexts
clustered in terms of their presumed influence on healthy development?
For individual children, the contexts are not highly correlated.
That is, if young people attend better schools or live in better
families, this has few implications for the quality of the other
contexts in their lives. However, the four contexts do cluster much
more tightly for the average student in a school or neighborhood.
The second questions is about the form of the joint influence of
all four contexts on developmental change. We find that all four
independently influence changes in success, and that they do so
additively. There is no evidence of statistical interactions among
the contexts or of other forms of non-linearity.
Thomas D. Cook,
Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
Melissa R. Herman, Department
of Sociology, Northwestern University
Meredith Phillips, School
of Public Policy and Social Research, University of
California at Los Angeles
Richard A. Settersten, Jr., Department
of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University
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