Neighborhood Conditions - Subject Baseline
This measure appears in the following time-points: Baseline.
Related Construct
Description of Measure
The Neighborhood Conditions Measure was adapted for this study to assess the environment surrounding the adolescent's home (Sampson & Raudenbush, 1999). Items from the self-report measure tap physical disorder of the neighborhood (e.g., "cigarettes on the street or in the gutters," "graffiti or tags"), as well as social disorder (e.g., "adults fighting or arguing loudly," "people using needles or syringes to take drugs"). The scale contains 21 items to which participants respond on a 4- point Likert scale ranging from "Never" to "Often," with higher scores indicating a greater degree of disorder within the community. An additional item is included to determine the amount of time the participant spends within his/her neighborhood where responses range from "None of my time" to "All of my time."
If the youth is in a locked facility at the time of the interview, the neighborhood of focus for this interview is the address at which the youth lived prior to going into the facility.
The scales were found to have excellent internal consistency at baseline (total score alpha = .94; physical disorder alpha = .91; social disorder alpha = .87). The physical disorder and social disorder scales correlate at .83. However, CFA of the 2-factor solution is not impressive (GFI: .84; RMR: .06). As a result, we recommend use of the total score only.
We have computed three scales from the neighborhood conditions items:
- total score [s0hood];the mean of all 21 items in the scale. Data must be contained in 16 of the 21 items in order to receive a computed mean.
- physical disorder [s0neiphy]; the mean of the 12 physical disorder questions
- social disorder [s0neisoc]; the mean of the 9 social disorder questions
References
- Elliott, D., Menard, S., Rankin, B., Elliott, A., Huizinga, D., and Wilson, W. (forthcoming). Beating the odds: Overcoming Disadvantage in High-Risk Neighborhoods.
- Elliott, D. S., Wilson, W. J., Huizinga, D., Sampson, R. J., Elliott, & Rankin. (1996). The effects of neighborhood disadvantage on adolescent development. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 33(4), 389-426.
- Sampson, R. & Raudenbush, S. (1999). Systematic social observation on public spaces: A new look at disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology, 105(3), 603-651.
- Sampson, R. & Raudenbush, S., Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918-924.
- Sampson, R. (1997). Collective regulation of adolescent misbehavior: Validation results from eighty Chicago neighborhoods. Journal of Adolescent Research, 12(2), 227-244.