Panel Paper: Childhood Neighborhood Inequality and Adult Educational Attainment: A Multi-Cohort Longitudinal Study, 1995 to 2012

Thursday, November 6, 2014 : 3:45 PM
Tesuque (Convention Center)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Ann Owens, University of Southern California and Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University
One mechanism through which residential segregation affects individuals is by creating unequal neighborhood contexts. Owens and Sampson explore the effects of growing up in different neighborhood contexts on educational attainment in young adulthood. This paper focuses on the educational outcomes of youth during the transition to adulthood through age 30 for a largely Latino and African American sample of young adults that grew up in Chicago during the 1990s. The authors estimate the effects of cumulative exposure during childhood and adolescence to three types of neighborhood contexts, moving beyond the typical focus in the literature on disadvantage to also examine neighborhood advantage and income mix, accounting for the full distribution of neighborhood resources. Rather than treat selection bias as a statistical nuisance, the authors model selection into neighborhoods over time to better estimate neighborhood effects on educational attainment. They employ Inverse Probability of Treatment weighting that accounts for the probability of subjects' exposure to various neighborhood contexts, based on their individual and family background characteristics. Overall, findings suggest that cumulative exposure to unequal neighborhood contexts over time leads to disparities in educational attainment in young adulthood. This research provides further evidence that neighborhood residence is a critically important context for youth development with enduring, cumulative, and lagged effects.