Good Kids from Bad Neighborhoods: Successful Development in Social Context (review)

This book starts with a paradox: although parents and children in high poverty urban neighborhoods face huge obstacles, most youth become successful adults. The MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on Successful Adolescent Development set out to solve this puzzle by initiating a comprehensive neighborhood study in Chicago and Denver. This research is distinctive in its emphasis on positive outcomes like "personal and prosocial competence" and being "on track;" its extension beyond poverty to other dimensions of disadvantage, such as residential stability, single-parent families and physical deterioration; and its focus on the mechanisms underlying neighborhood influence.

In Denver, 662 families and 820 youth ages 10-18 were studied in 33 neighborhoods (census block groups); 40 Chicago neighborhoods (census tracts) included 545 families and 830 youth ages 11-16. Chicago respondents, predominantly black, lived in high- and low-poverty neighborhoods; the Denver sample was more economically and ethnically diverse (white, Latino and black). The project draws on youth surveys, parent interviews, focus groups, in-depth interviews with adults and teens, and U.S. Census data.

The authors expected that the neighborhood's social composition and physical features would influence its social organization and culture in ways that promote or detract from the capacity of families, schools and peer groups to raise children. A positive social organization and culture was defined by formal institutions that effectively provide services, strong informal networks and consensus on child-rearing goals and child behavior aimed at fostering child monitoring and resistance to deviant activity. Good neighborhoods had positive adult role models and few illegal models and performance opportunities. More proximal family (resources, dysfunction, parenting practices, normative climate), school (learning environment, violence/safety), and peer (prosocial, problematic or illegal behavior) contexts are also assessed. The determinants of developmental success were found to vary by the level of analysis (neighborhood or individual), success outcome, neighborhood context and city.

Not unexpectedly, the more positive contexts for development were the advantaged neighborhoods, and their young residents were the more successful. Across neighborhoods, the findings supported the theoretical model: "It is the social organization and culture that largely determine the quality of the neighborhood as a socialization context and these emergent properties account for nearly all of the neighborhood effect on development." (277) Good family contexts, safe schools with positive climates and positive peer groups also predicted success.

Nonetheless, 90 percent or more of individual variation in success occurred within neighborhoods: "...for any given individual, the practical advantage of living in an Advantaged, as compared to a Disadvantaged neighborhood, appears to be quite modest. There is simply much more variation in the quality of families, schools, peer groups, and community agencies than suggested by high-poverty neighborhood ethnographies and conventional wisdom about the inner-city poor." (276) For individuals, parenting practices and parental conventional values, good schools with low levels of violence, and well organized neighborhoods predicted personal and prosocial competence; the peer context had strong influence on prosocial and problem behaviors. Minorities and youth from poor families were not especially vulnerable to the effects of neighborhood disadvantage.

Findings from the two cities are continually juxtaposed and often differ. For example, neighborhood disadvantage in Denver was associated with ineffective neighborhood organization and culture, while in Chicago poverty was not linked to weak neighborhood organization. An organized neighborhood promoted successful development more strongly in Denver than Chicago. Correlates of large support networks were nearly opposite in the two sites, with large support networks in Chicago unexpectedly related to family dysfunction, more illegal role models, higher neighborhood disadvantage, etc. Only in Denver did neighborhood disadvantage predict arrest more strongly than problem behavior, indicating differential response to deviance by criminal justice agents.

The methodological differences across sites weaken the comparative potential of this study. It is unclear whether such discrepancies in findings indicate true differences, or whether they are due to variability in Denver and Chicago in the...