Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Background and Purpose: Neighborhoods have been found to significantly influence a wide range of individual outcomes, including health (Kawachi, Kennedy & Wilkinson, 1999), child development (Brooks-Gunn, 1997), and economic mobility (Vidal, 2004). Two characteristics of neighborhoods – social cohesion and informal social control (Sampson, Raudenbush & Earls, 1997) – have emerged as leading explanatory factors for how neighborhoods influence individual outcomes. This paper examines the relationship of neighborhood social cohesion and social control to families' experience of poverty. While the ratio of income to needs is a general indicator of poverty, it is the experience of material hardship in terms of insufficient funds for food, housing, and medical care that reflect the experience of poverty (Mayer & Jencks, 1988). We hypothesize that neighborhood characteristics are likely to influence material hardship, and that material hardship is likely to contribute significantly to outcomes like child development (Gershoff, et al., 2007). In this paper we assess the first of these hypotheses.

Method: Data come from surveys of 6,186 households in targeted low-income neighborhoods across 10 U.S. cities conducted in 2002-2003 by the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Making Connections initiative. Respondents represent probability samples of residents living in designated Making Connections neighborhoods. Indicators of social cohesion and informal social control were measured using items from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (Sampson, Raudenbush & Earls, 1997). Hardship variables were assessed with three binary items indicating whether respondent's family was unable to buy food, medicine, or pay housing related expenses in the last 12 months.

Results: Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was conducted using MPlus 4.1 (Muthen & Muthen, 2006). Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI), Comparative Fit Index (CFI) and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) were used to determine goodness of fit for all models. Measurement models for social cohesion and informal social control, each with five indicators, yielded excellent fit statistics. Three structural models were constructed incorporating latent factors for social cohesion and social control in relation to each of the three hardship variables. Model fit statistics are as follows: food insecurity – TLI=0.99, CFI=0.98, RMSEA=0.05; unmet medical need – TLI=0.99, CFI=0.98, RMSEA=0.05; housing insufficiency – TLI=0.99, CFI=0.98 RMSEA=0.05. Results show that social cohesion is significantly related to food, medical and housing hardship (standardized betas are 0.16, 0.11, 0.21 respectively), while social control is not significantly related to any measure of hardship.

Conclusions and Implications: Our results show the relative importance of neighborhood social cohesion in comparison to informal social control for families' experience of poverty. This finding provides a new way to examine the relationship of social cohesion and informal social control to family well-being; whereas earlier research has weighed both of these characteristics equally, our research suggests that these factors have unique relationships with different well-being outcomes. The implications of our finding are that social work interventions aimed at ameliorating the experience of poverty would be better served by focusing on increasing neighborhood social cohesion rather than informal social control.