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Employing community data to investigate social and structural dimensions of urban neighborhoods: An early childhood education example

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American Journal of Community Psychology

Abstract

The present study sought to define neighborhood context by examining relationships among data from city-level administrative databases at the level of the census block group. The present neighborhood investigation included 1,801 block groups comprising a large, northeastern metropolitan area. Common factor analyses and multistage, hierarchical cluster analyses yielded two dimensions (i.e., Social Stress, Structural Danger) and two typologies (i.e., Racial Composition, Property Structure Composition) of neighborhood context. Simultaneous multiple regression analyses revealed small but statistically significant associations between neighborhood variables and academic outcomes for public school kindergarten children.

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Notes

  1. Although the American Community Survey (ACS) will provide more frequent census data, this information will be limited at the census tract level (US Census Bureau, 2003).

  2. Specific information about the Cartographic Modeling Lab (CML) can be found at http://www.cml.upenn.edu.

  3. Child outcome information for this study was gathered as part of a larger system-wide evaluation (see Fantuzzo, Cohen, McDermott, Sekino, Childs, & Weiss, 2004, submitted).

  4. The use of multi-level regression analyses was precluded because over 60% of the block groups contained only 1 or 2 children (50% of which contained only 1 child per block group).

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded in part by the William Penn Foundation. Special thanks goes to Ronnie Bloom and her colleagues for their support, and to Ping Qin, Senior Database Administrator at the Cartographic Modeling Lab.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Psychology, The Steinhardt School of Education, New York University, 239 Greene Street, New York, NY, 10003-6674, USA

    Christine M. McWayne

  2. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Paul A. McDermott, John W. Fantuzzo & Dennis P. Culhane

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  1. Christine M. McWayne
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Correspondence to Christine M. McWayne.

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McWayne, C.M., McDermott, P.A., Fantuzzo, J.W. et al. Employing community data to investigate social and structural dimensions of urban neighborhoods: An early childhood education example. Am J Community Psychol 39, 47–60 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-007-9098-z

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