The Statistical Measurement of Neighbourhood Effects

Social scientists have been concerned about the effects on families and children of living in poor neighbourhoods for at least sixty years. However, interest in the conceptualisation and measurement of the influence of the neighbourhood context on the development and educational attainments of young people increased during the 1980s and 1990s, primarily due to a growing awareness that in the developed countries poverty was becoming more urban, spatially-concentrated and clustered with other indicators of disadvantage. As a result of industrial restructuring and changes in state policy, trends encouraging the geographical concentration of poverty accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s, leading to the development of concentrated areas of inner-city poverty in the United States and to the deterioration of living conditions in the large peripheral housing estates located outside many European cities. Residents in neighbourhoods of concentrated poverty experience multiple forms of social and economic disadvantage. It is not just single risk factors that determine child and family outcomes, but the accumulation of a range of risk and protective factors.