Session: Family and Neighborhood Assets: Implications for Child Outcomes (Society for Social Work and Research 15th Annual Conference: Emerging Horizons for Social Work Research)

Background: New evidence is beginning to illuminate the role family assets play in shaping child outcomes. Less attention has been given to understanding how neighborhood assets may also impact child well-being. This symposium explores the interaction between family assets, neighborhood assets and child outcomes. Specifically, the four papers present studies that investigate the processes by which parental assets and neighborhood assets influence outcomes such as education, future expectations, and behavior among low-income children and youth. Given the importance of both family and neighborhood assets to child outcomes, a better understanding of the mechanism through which they interact is critical to inform policies and programs that aim to improve child outcomes through asset building.

Methods: The four studies presented in this symposium represent a range of rigorous research methods, including randomized experimental designs, quasi-experimental designs, and longitudinal panel surveys. The data are coming from a variety of sources including the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement, Detroit public schools, the Community Advantage Program Survey, and qualitative and quantitative pilot data from an asset building pilot intervention in Uganda. The four studies use a range of analytic techniques to account for clustering, survey non-response, endogeniety, and selection bias. Analytic methods include path analysis, nested hierarchical regression multilevel modeling, and others. Each study focuses on populations underrepresented in most asset-based research, including racial/ethnic minority youth and rural African households.

Results: The first study finds that parental expectations for their children predict both high school graduation and college enrollment and mediate the effect of parental assets, even when controlling for income. In addition, lower neighborhood assets are associated with lower school performance. The second study finds that the effect of homeownership on child well-being differs by the level of neighborhood stability and neighborhood density. Further, this study found that the addition of neighborhood characteristics significantly increases the explanatory power of the model. Results from the third study suggest that low-income youth who have saved for college are much more likely to attend college than those with no school savings. However, the presence of youth's school savings is not a predictor of college attendance for high-income youth. Among low-income youth, the presence of parental savings for the youth's education is significantly associated with the youth's educational expectations. The final study finds that both neighborhood and family level characteristics help explain household banking behavior among rural households in Uganda. The presence of informal savings mechanisms in the community is significantly associated with bank savings among youth in Uganda. Significant family-level characteristics include household size, perception of livelihood, financial education, and informal savings.

Implications: This symposium addresses important gaps in the current literature on the interaction between family assets, neighborhood assets, and child outcomes. Taken together, these studies advance the knowledge of how parental and neighborhood assets impact children's outcomes. The results of these studies provide important implications for how effective interventions must take into account the role of both parental asset and neighborhood assets in policy design and program development.