Neighborhood Social Processes and Child Maltreatment: Lessons from a Review Study

Background and Purpose: Neighborhood as an extra-familial source of child maltreatment (CM) has received increasing attention over the past 40 years. Neighborhood contexts associated with CM include structural characteristics in defined geographic areas and social processes that refer to interactions between residents within the neighborhoods. Neighborhood social processes are subjective perceptions of the way in which families act towards neighborhood problems and interact with others, such as how people collectively provide social control over maltreating behaviors and how they connect with one another in neighborhoods. Although two comprehensive reviews, published more than 15 years ago, advanced our knowledge of the relationship between neighborhood structures and CM, no synthesis of their findings on the relationship between neighborhood social processes and CM has been done. This study critically reviews the extant literature published between the 1970s and 2023 on neighborhood social processes and CM to identify possible ways in which individuals interact and patterns of behaviors which can be modified to decrease CM.

Methods: This study uses a scoping review method, an appropriate alternative to systematic review when literature is complex. It is appropriate to the topic because some research on neighborhood social processes and CM has taken ethnographic and qualitative approaches. Articles were identified through a comprehensive literature search using major electronic databases, including Social Service Abstracts, PubMed, Google Scholar, and ProQuest. Search terms such as child and maltreatment (or abuse or neglect) in combination with neighborhood (or neighbor), community, processes, a combination with social and processes, support, participation, social control, cohesion, and collective efficacy were entered to elicit appropriate articles. Peer-reviewed studies as well as master’s theses and doctoral dissertations were included if they examined CM as a dependent variable; analyzed at least one predictor for neighborhood social processes; and if quantitative, included bivariate or multivariate analysis.

Results: The initial search using the search terms yielded 1,717 studies. The group included studies that did not actually address neighborhoods but only mentioned them. Therefore, the search was narrowed to studies that included one of the terms for social processes predictors exactly, which eliminated all but 37. These 37 studies provide several insights. First, a growing number of studies have been designed to explain the role of neighborhood social processes in CM by implementing community surveys. Second, findings are mixed in terms of measures of social processes and types of maltreatment. Last, the application of analytical approaches designed to deal with the statistical issues posed by social processes among individuals that are nested within neighborhoods has advanced.

Conclusions and Implications: Despite the varying results across the studies, findings from considering the social aspects of individuals’ processes within larger neighborhoods are meaningful in that they can help practitioners design community-based interventions for CM, along the lines of Belsky’s proposal as a means to prevent and reduce CM. Future research should examine how neighborhood structural characteristics affect how families interact in their neighborhoods over time as well as more replications of studies examining social processes and CM in different neighborhoods with similar conditions.