Intersections of Individual and Neighborhood Disadvantage: Implications for Child Maltreatment

Background: Parenting behaviors are influenced by numerous factors, including individual, family, and community contexts.  Ecological systems theory suggests that these systems as well as interactions among the systems coalesce to influence the parent/child relationship in multiple ways.  When challenges exist within and across these systems, child abuse and neglect can occur.  While a significant body of research has delved into parsing the relative importance of neighborhood-level versus individual-level predictors, little is known about the complex ways in which interactions across ecological systems might enhance or hinder parenting behaviors.  The current study seeks to fill this gap by answering the following research questions:  (1) Are there interactive effects of individual and neighborhood poverty on the risk of child maltreatment?; and (2) To what extent are these associations explained by parenting stress?

Methods: This study uses data collected in Franklin County, Ohio.  In total, 1,045 parents at WIC clinics completed the survey.  The final sample size is 946 parents, after excluding those with missing data on maltreatment and poverty measures.  Child abuse and neglect was assessed using parent self-report on the Conflict Tactics Scale Parent-to-Child version.  Individual poverty is measured as a count of the number of material hardships experienced in the past year.  Neighborhood poverty is measured with a dichotomous indicator of whether there were more than 35% of families with children in the respondent’s zip code that fell below the federal poverty line.  Our mediating variable, parenting stress, was measured using parent self-report on the Parent Stress Index-Short form.  Covariates included sex, household size, marital status, education level, and housing instability.  Using structural equation modeling, we examine the direct and indirect associations of individual and neighborhood poverty with child maltreatment. 

 Results: Aside from physical neglect, we do not find that poor parents in low-poverty neighborhoods have lower odds of maltreatment than poor parents in high-poverty neighborhoods.  The association between individual poverty status and maltreatment is partially mediated by parenting stress. Additionally, being in a high-poverty neighborhood is associated with higher levels of maltreatment, regardless of individual poverty status, but this effect is not explained by the parenting stress mediator.  These findings suggest that both individual poverty status and neighborhood poverty matter for child maltreatment, that parenting stress partially mediates the relationship with individual poverty, and that there does not appear to be a compounding effect of being both poor and in a poor neighborhood, nor is there a protective effect when poor but living in a nonpoor neighborhood.

Conclusion: The results suggest the need for examining risk factors at multiple levels of the social ecology.  For example, the finding that there appears to be no protective effect in our sample for poor individuals living in nonpoor neighborhoods suggests the need for intervening on both individual as well as neighborhood poverty.  Interventions such as the Moving to Opportunities program would likely have no impact on child maltreatment if such interventions do not also include resources to reduce individual poverty.