Jaap Nieuwenhuis

The association between neighbourhoods and educational achievement, a systematic review and meta-analysis

AbstractMany studies have examined the effects of neighbourhoods on educational outcomes. The results of these studies are often conflicting, even if the same independent variables (such as poverty, educational climate, social disorganisation, or ethnic composition) are used. A systematic meta-analysis may help to resolve this lack of external validity. We identified 5516 articles from which we selected 88 that met all of the inclusion criteria. Using meta-regression, we found that the relation between neighbourhoods and individual educational outcomes is a function of neighbourhood poverty, the neighbourhood’s educational climate, the proportion of ethnic/migrant groups, and social disorganisation in the neighbourhood. The variance in the findings from different studies can partly be explained by the sampling design and the type of model used in each study. More important is the use of control variables (school, family SES, and parenting variables) in explaining the variation in the strength of neighbourhood effects.

“A Bad Neighbour Is as Great a Plague as a Good One Is a Great Blessing”: On Negative Relationships between Neighbours

With research on social relations hitherto, it is not clear how and why negative relationships between neighbours emerge. In this study, arguments are developed on the conditions within neighbourhoods and on individual characteristics that facilitate negative relations amongst neighbours. The arguments are divided according to three perspectives: diversity, uncertainty and social influence. In the Dutch context, most support is found for the social influence perspective, and both the neighbourhood and the individual level seem important in explaining negative relationships. Important factors that explain the likelihood for negative relationships are the willingness of residents to intervene on behalf of the neighbourhood, religious diversity and individually perceived conflicts in the neighbourhood. However, people who have more relationships outside the neighbourhood, undergo less influence of perceived conflict.

Being Poorer Than the Rest of the Neighborhood: Relative Deprivation and Problem Behavior of Youth

According to the neighborhood effects hypothesis, there is a negative relation between neighborhood wealth and youth’s problem behavior. It is often assumed that there are more problems in deprived neighborhoods, but there are also reports of higher rates of behavioral problems in more affluent neighborhoods. Much of this literature does not take into account relative wealth. Our central question was whether the economic position of adolescents’ families, relative to the neighborhood in which they lived, was related to adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing problem behavior. We used longitudinal data for youth between 12–16 and 16–20 years of age, combined with population register data (N = 926; 55% females). We employ between-within models to account for time-invariant confounders, including parental background characteristics. Our findings show that, for adolescents, moving to a more affluent neighborhood was related to increased levels of depression, social phobia, aggression, and conflict with fathers and mothers. This could be indirect evidence for the relative deprivation mechanism, but we could not confirm this, and we did not find any gender differences. The results do suggest that future research should further investigate the role of individuals’ relative position in their neighborhood in order not to overgeneralize neighborhood effects and to find out for whom neighborhoods matter.

Neighbourhood effects on school achievement: the mediating effect of parenting and problematic behaviour?

Neighbourhood research hitherto has suggested that the neighbourhood in which youth grow up affects their educational achievement. However, the mechanisms though which the neighbourhood reaches these effects are still unclear. Family and individual characteristics seem important in explaining educational outcomes. We therefore propose two related mediating factors: Parenting strategies and problematic behaviour. We test this mediation using the 2009 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children data for the Netherlands (N = 2683), in which adolescents are surveyed about their behaviour and relationships and, additionally, their parents are interviewed about their child and their parenting. These data are combined with data from Statistics Netherlands, which include neighbourhood-level information about real-estate value and ethnic variation of the neighbourhood population. The results show that the effects of the proportion of immigrant groups and the mean property values in the neighbourhood are unlikely to be mediated by parenting behaviours and problematic behaviour. The results also show that parents are likely to adapt their parenting behaviours to demographic neighbourhood characteristics. For example, parents in neighbourhoods with higher ethnic heterogeneity apply more protective parenting strategies.

Neighbourhood immigrant concentration effects on migrant and native youth’s educational commitments, an enquiry into personality differences

In the literature examining neighbourhood effects on educational outcomes, the socialisation mechanism is usually investigated by looking at the association between neighbourhood characteristics and educational attainment. The step in between, that adolescents actually internalise educational norms held by residents, is often assumed. We attempt to fill this gap by looking at how the internalisation of educational norms (commitments) is influenced by neighbourhoods’ immigrant concentration. We investigate this process for both migrant and native youth, as both groups might be influenced differently by immigrant concentrations. To test our hypothesis we used longitudinal panel data with five waves (N = 4255), combined with between-within models which control for a large portion of potential selection bias. These models have an advantage over naïve OLS models in that they predict the effect of change in neighbourhood characteristics on change in educational commitment, and therefore offer a more dynamic approach to modelling neighbourhood effects. Our results show that living in neighbourhoods with higher proportions of immigrants increases the educational commitments of migrant youth compared to living in neighbourhoods with lower proportions. Besides, we find that adolescents with a resilient personality experience less influence of the neighbourhood context on educational commitments than do adolescents with non-resilient personalities.

Biological sensitivity to context: cortisol awakening response moderates the effects of neighbourhood density on the development of adolescent externalizing problem behaviours

Highlights • CARAUCg moderates the effects of neighbourhood density on externalizing behaviours.• Dense neighbourhood predicts externalizing behaviours in youths with high CARAUCg.• CARAUCg is an important marker of biological sensitivity to neighbourhood context.

Neighbourhood poverty, work commitment and unemployment in early adulthood: a longitudinal study into the moderating effect of personality

We studied how personality moderates the effect of neighbourhood disadvantage on work commitment and unemployment in early adulthood. Using a personality typology of resilients, overcontrollers, and undercontrollers, we hypothesised that the association between neighbourhood poverty and both work commitment and unemployment would be stronger for overcontrollers and undercontrollers than for resilients. We used longitudinal data (N = 249) to test whether the length of exposure to neighbourhood poverty between age 16 and 21 predicts work commitment and unemployment at age 25. In line with our hypothesis, the findings showed that longer exposure was related to weaker work commitment among undercontrollers and overcontrollers and to higher unemployment among undercontrollers. Resilients’ work commitment and unemployment were not predicted by neighbourhood poverty.

Data on children׳s neighborhood income trajectories using small geographical units to operationalize neighborhood boundaries

It is well-known that the spatial scale at which neighborhoods are operationalized can affect the outcomes we observe. This article describes a typology of children׳s neighborhood income trajectories generated by sequence analysis using 100 × 100 m grids to define neighborhoods. The article further describes ethnic differences in the prevalence of the different types of neighborhood trajectories, focusing on the children of the four largest non-Western immigrant groups in the Netherlands (Turks, Moroccans, Surinamese, Antilleans) and native Dutch children. The data can be compared to the research article “Ethnic differences in timing and duration of exposure to neighborhood disadvantage during childhood” (Kleinepier et al., 2018).