Neighborhood Context and Child Aggression

2 Presentation to Prevention Science and Methodology Group n By Beth Vanfossen, Towson University n February 13-15, 2002, UCLA n Contact:

3 Acknowledgements I acknowledge the efforts of co-authors: Virginia Thompson, Susan Doering, Carolyn Giordano, and Jackie King of Towson University, C. Hendricks Brown of University of South Florida, and Sheppard G. Kellam of American Institute for Research. Ideas were contributed by Francis Rothstein, Natalie Sokoloff, Nicholas Ialongo, Margaret Ensminger, Keith Harries, Jeanne Poduska, Alka Indurkya, Bengt Muthen, Linda Muthen, Diane Clark, Sharon Lambert’s Research Group, and the Baltimore Police Department, none of whom are responsible for the content. Funded by the National Science Foundation (#BCS ), the William T. Grant Foundation (Grant #2045), and Towson University.

4 Our Research Questions: n Are there relationships between neighborhood characteristics and the aggressive behavior of boys and girls? n How important are they compared to the influence of the characteristics of parents and children?

5 Methodological problems plaguing past research include: n Omission of important variables n Need for multilevel designs n Inadequate control for family characteristics n Too many cross-sectional designs

6 The Conceptual Model We Started With:

7 This research attempts to clarify by using advances in: n Structural equation modeling n Latent growth modeling n Multilevel modeling; To do this, it employs an extensive, longitudinal dataset of children coupled with neighborhood variables from the census and police.

8 SAMPLE –From the Baltimore Schools Study (Dr. Sheppard Kellam, Principal Investigator), 2100 school children studied each year between grades 1 and 7.

9 n The study sample contains 906 children who attended the Baltimore City Public Schools in East Baltimore during their 1 st to 7 th grade years, starting in n Sample attrition: By 1993 (9 th grade), 69.3 percent of the baseline subjects remained in the study.

10 MEASURES – The Child Data n Child aggression, family income, child’s family structure, and race n Census tract data: median household income, %Percent of households that are African American.

11 Police data: –Violence measured by aggravated assault, homicide, and rape rates – all crimes known to the Baltimore City police in 1989, 1990, and 1991.

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18 SUMMARY n Neighborhood poverty and violence are strongly related to increases in child aggression, even when controlling for neighborhood racial composition and individual and family characteristics.

19 n Also related, but less strongly, are the child’s family’s income, n And, for girls and through inconsistent paths, family structure, the child’s race, and neighborhood percent black are related to aggression.

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