Parental Perceptions of Neighborhood Influence On Latino and African American Adolescents

Purpose: Research on neighborhood effects has grown rapidly in recent years as researchers have acknowledged the independently causal effects of neighborhood context on various psychosocial and health related outcomes. Although a number of studies have examined neighborhood effects, there has been little research conducted to date which qualitatively explores the lived experience and perceptions of parents who reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This study aims to qualitatively and quantitatively examine the perceptions of neighborhood influence on adolescent children from the perspective of low-income, Latino and African American parents in Denver, CO.

Methods: The data utilized in this study come from a large-scale, mixed-methods study of 443 current and former Latino and African American residents of the Denver (CO) Housing Authority (DHA) whose children were adolescents when they lived in public housing. Since 1969, DHA has operated a larger number of scattered-site public housing units in addition to their conventional public housing developments. Since 1987, initial assignment of households on the DHA waiting list to either scattered-site or conventional public housing developments mimics a random process and thus, represents an unusual natural experiment that may overcome the problem of selection bias in the measurement of neighborhood effects. Informed by social disorganization theory and using Miles and Huberman's (1984) method of data reduction, 7 dominant themes emerged from parental perceptions of neighborhood influences: (1) collective efficacy, (2) crime/violence, (3) quality of neighborhood, (4) social support, (5) isolation from neighborhood, (6) neighborhood resources, and (7) parental control. All themes were quantitized and were examined by comparing parents by ethnicity, type of DHA residence, and perception of neighborhood influence on their children (negative influence, no influence or a positive influence). Multinomial logistic regression was employed to assess predictors of these parental perceptions of neighborhood effects.

Results: For parents who felt their neighborhoods exerted a “negative influence” on their children (n=114), the most salient ways were the presence of drugs (34%), violence (48%) and negative peer influence (32%). For parents who indicated that their neighborhood had a “positive influence” on their children, parents cited good quality of neighborhood (35%), social support (27%), and access to community resources (19%). Approximately one-quarter of parents indicated that their neighborhoods had “no influence” on their children; however, this was often accompanied by themes such as keeping inside and spending time outside of the neighborhood. Quantitative analyses of these data revealed significant differences by ethnicity and DHA housing type.

Implications: By incorporating parental perceptions of neighborhood disadvantage into our analyses, this study provides a more nuanced assessment of the mechanisms by which neighborhoods influence the health and well-being of adolescent minority children. Study findings are discussed in terms of their contributions to the literature on neighborhood effects as well as the subsequent behavioral implications for low-income parents who reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods.