Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

Purpose: Current research demonstrates that social problems, including poverty, racial isolation, crime, delinquency, and social and physical disorder, tend to cluster at the neighborhood level and has assessed the impact of such neighborhood characteristics on a variety of outcomes, including child well-being and mental health (e.g. Aneshensel & Sucoff, 1996; Bellair, 1997; Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, Klebanov, & Sealand, 1993 Sampson, Morenoff, & Gannon-Rowley, 2002). Neighborhoods also differ in access to a variety of services. Poorer and less organized communities are generally at a disadvantage for health care services (Ellen, Mijanovich, & Dillman, 2001; Huie, 2001). Although there has been a recent upsurge in neighborhood effects research, little has been done to assess their impact on social service utilization, including the use of food stamps, public housing, health care, and welfare. The purpose of this study is to assess neighborhood effects on social service utilization.

Methods: This study utilizes data from Wave 2 (2000/2001) of the Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study (Cherlin, Angel, Burton, Chase-Lansdale, Moffitt, & Wilson, 2001). The Three-City Study is a longitudinal study of children and their caregivers residing in low-income neighborhoods in Boston, San Antonio, and Chicago (n=1712) (Mince, Ruiz, McKean, & Peterson, 2003). Data was extracted for variables related to demographics, social support, residential mobility, dwelling problems (peeling paint, broken windows), neighborhoods (perceptions of neighborhood informal social control such as whether neighbors would act if children were truant, if there was graffiti, if adults were disrespected by children, and if there was fighting), and perceptions of neighborhood problems (unemployment, abandoned houses, theft, assaults, gangs activity, drug dealing). Outcome variables concerned social service utilization including TANF, WIC, FSP, Medicaid, SSI, and public housing. Multilevel modeling was used to assess the affects of neighborhood characteristics on social service utilization.

Results: While individual factors play a larger role in social service utilization in the three cities studied, certain neighborhood factors were found to be important too. All of the level-one variables extracted from the larger dataset were put into the model, however only three of these predictors were found to improve the fit of the model and reduce the amount of residual variance: race, marital status, and desire to move from one's neighborhood. Three neighborhood-level predictors were also found to improve the fit of the model and reduce the amount of residual variance: neighborhood rating, neighborhood problems, and informal social control. As informal social control within one's neighborhood and one's positive rating of one's neighborhood increased, the number of social services utilized decreased.

Implications: As number of neighborhood problems one perceived increased, the amount of social services utilized decreased. This is in keeping with previous literature (Sampson, et al., 2002 and Wilson, 1987). This is a large reduction providing evidence for the importance of these variables as predictors of social service utilization suggesting that both individual and neighborhood characteristics affect social service utilization. These findings have important implications for outreach in disadvantaged communities and the provision of social services to their residents.