"Neighborhood disadvantage" refers to the challenging or unfavorable conditions that exist within a specific area or community. This can include factors such as high crime rates, limited access to quality education, poor infrastructure, low income levels, and limited job opportunities. These conditions can affect the overall well-being and opportunities available to individuals living in that specific neighborhood.
Full definition
Unfortunately, very little research sheds direct light on the role
of neighborhood disadvantage in explaining verbal ability, and in addition, common strategies for controlling selection preclude unbiased estimation of the magnitude or causal status of neighborhood effects.
These findings suggest the need for increased attention to how
neighborhood disadvantage influences student conduct, and for policymakers and school leaders to consider the kinds of school resources that could support students facing adverse home and community circumstances.
Hence, there are plausible theoretical reasons to hypothesize that
neighborhood disadvantage constrains parental practices and the family environment «under the roof» (8), which may in turn bear on cognitive achievement.
Associations
among neighborhood disadvantage, maternal acculturation, parenting and conduct problems were investigated in a sample of 444 Chinese American adolescents.
The influence
of neighborhood disadvantage, collective socialization, and parenting on African American children's affiliation with deviant peers.
Using the largest nationally representative survey of US adolescent mental health available, we estimated the association
between neighborhood disadvantage and adolescent emotional disorders and the extent to which urbanicity modified this association.
The researchers found that
neighborhood disadvantage was not positively associated with markers of inflammation and metabolic dysfunction in the children.
If the effect of
neighborhood disadvantage is cumulative, lags, or is most salient early in life, as recent evidence suggests for adolescent mental health (25), moving out of that context in adolescence may not provide the best test of the causal effect of the social environment.
Across all U.S. neighborhoods, the percentage of children < 18 years of age exposed to
neighborhood disadvantage is far lower than in Chicago.
Hierarchical linear modeling results revealed that
neighborhood disadvantage was related to lower levels of maternal monitoring.
Inconsistent evidence of a relationship between
neighborhood disadvantage and adolescent mental health may be, in part, attributable to heterogeneity based on urban or rural residence.
In addition, guided by segmented assimilation theory, measures of
neighborhood disadvantage were expected not only to be related to differences in parenting, but also to moderate the effects of maternal acculturation on parenting.
Urbanicity modifies the relationship between
neighborhood disadvantage and emotional disorder in adolescents.
The association between
neighborhood disadvantage and emotional disorder was more than twice as large for adolescents living in urban centers versus non-urban areas.