DESTINATION EFFECTS: RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY AND TRAJECTORIES OF ADOLESCENT VIOLENCE IN A STRATIFIED METROPOLIS*
- 17 August 2010
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Criminology
- Vol. 48 (3), 639-681
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2010.00198.x
Abstract
Two landmark policy interventions to improve the lives of youth through neighborhood mobility—the Gautreaux program in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiments in five cities—have produced conflicting results and have created a puzzle with broad implications: Do residential moves between neighborhoods increase or decrease violence, or both? To address this question, we analyze data from a subsample of adolescents ages 9–12 years from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of children and their families that began in Chicago—the site of the original Gautreaux program and one of the MTO experiments. We propose a dynamic modeling strategy to separate the effects of residential moving across three waves of the study from dimensions of neighborhood change and metropolitan location. The results reveal countervailing effects of mobility on trajectories of violence; whereas neighborhood moves within Chicago lead to an increased risk of violence, moves outside the city reduce violent offending and exposure to violence. The gap in violence between movers within and outside Chicago is explained not only by the racial and economic composition of the destination neighborhoods but also by the quality of school contexts, adolescents' perceived control over their new environment, and fear. These findings highlight the need to simultaneously consider residential mobility, mechanisms of neighborhood change, and the wider geography of structural opportunity.Keywords
This publication has 42 references indexed in Scilit:
- Neighborhood Effects on Economic Self‐Sufficiency: A Reconsideration of the Moving to Opportunity ExperimentAmerican Journal of Sociology, 2008
- Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American childrenProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008
- Neighborhood resources, racial segregation, and economic mobility: Results from the Gautreaux programSocial Science Research, 2006
- What Do Randomized Studies of Housing Mobility Demonstrate?Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2006
- Residential Mobility and Adolescent ViolenceSocial Forces, 2005
- Firearm Violence Exposure and Serious Violent BehaviorScience, 2005
- Changing the geography of opportunity by expanding residential choice: Lessons from the Gautreaux programHousing Policy Debate, 1995
- The Education and Employment of Low-Income Black Youth in White SuburbsEducational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 1992
- A new approach to causal inference in mortality studies with a sustained exposure period—application to control of the healthy worker survivor effectMathematical Modelling, 1986
- The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effectsBiometrika, 1983