Parents, Peers, Perceived Risk of Harm, and the Neighborhood: Contextualizing Key Influences on Adolescent Substance Use

Recent research has affirmed the need to examine contextual influences on adolescent substance use in a multilevel framework. 

This study examined the role of neighborhood opportunities for substance use in promoting adolescent substance use. Data came from two components of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods: the Longitudinal Cohort Study, consisting of interviews with youth and their primary caregivers across three waves of data with an average span of 4.5 years; and a Community Survey of neighborhood residents. 

Analysis used an Item-Response Theory-based statistical approach on 6556 substance use item responses from 1639 youth (49.0 % female) within 80 neighborhoods to assess the extent to which neighborhood opportunities for substance use had direct and indirect effects on adolescent substance use. Neither direct nor mediated effects of neighborhood opportunities for substance use on adolescent substance use were detected. 

But, analyses revealed moderating effects such that higher levels of neighborhood opportunities for substance use: 

1. amplified the detrimental effects of parental substance use and peer substance use on youth substance use; and 
2. attenuated the protective effect of adolescents' perceived harm of substance use on adolescent substance use. 

The results suggest that the ways in which neighborhood characteristics impact adolescent behavior are nuanced. Rather than impact individual-level outcomes directly, neighborhood context may be particularly relevant by conditioning the effects of salient individual-level risk and protective factors for substance use.

Purchase full article at:   http://goo.gl/quPvIW

By:  Zimmerman GM1, Farrell C2.

• 1School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, 417 Churchill Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, USA. g.zimmerman@neu.edu.
• 2School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, 502B Hayden Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, USA. 
• J Youth Adolesc. 2016 Mar 25.

More at:  https://twitter.com/hiv insight

And: http://twitter.com/Prison Health

Children's Cognitive Performance and Selective Attention Following Recent Community Violence

Research has shown robust relationships between community violence and psychopathology, yet relatively little is known about the ways in which community violence may affect cognitive performance and attention. 

The present study estimates the effects of police-reported community violence on 359 urban children's performance on a computerized neuropsychological task using a quasi-experimental fixed-effects design. Living in close proximity to a recent violent crime predicted faster but marginally less accurate task performance for the full sample, evolutionarily adaptive patterns of “vigilant” attention (i.e., less attention toward positive stimuli, more attention toward negative stimuli) for children reporting low trait anxiety, and potentially maladaptive patterns of “avoidant” attention for highly anxious children. These results suggest that community violence can directly affect children's cognitive performance while also having different (and potentially orthogonal) impacts on attention deployment depending on children's levels of biobehavioral risk. 

Implications for mental health and sociological research are discussed.

...Specifically, we find that children whose cognitive performance was assessed within one week after a violent event occurred within a half mile of their home were faster and marginally less accurate in locating the position of a dot on a computer screen than their peers who came from the same community but who were assessed either before or well after a violent crime took place. These results suggest that the physiological and mental demands of dealing with an environmental stressor may reduce children's cognitive capacity to focus on a simple task and instead lead to more automatic (i.e., faster but error-prone) task performance. Such impulsive response patterns are in line with clinical research showing short-term impairments in information processing, effortful control, and other aspects of higher-order self-regulation following trauma (Brandes et al. 2002; Nader and Fairbanks 1994) and may help to explain previously observed reductions in children's academic performance and regulatory capacity following exposure to homicide (Sharkey 2010; Sharkey et al. 2012). Future research that includes longitudinal data on psychological and behavioral functioning is needed to understand the degree to which the short-term effects of violent crime on cognitive performance may lead to more stable deficits in mental/behavioral health over time.

Importantly, the observed relationship between community violence and average response time was driven primarily by children reporting low trait anxiety (a proxy for low levels of biobehavioral arousal), whereas highly anxious children maintained relatively consistent response time regardless of violence. Differential response patterns for children characterized by varying levels of anxiety were also observed when testing children's selective attention outcomes. Children with low levels of trait anxiety who were assessed immediately after a nearby violent event showed vigilant response patterns, including increased attention toward negative images and decreased attention toward positive images compared to their peers who were assessed before or well after a crime took place. Highly anxious children, on the other hand, exhibited response patterns more associated with avoidance, including decreased attention toward negative images and increased attention toward positive images following a crime. Consistent across analyses, the magnitude of the impact of violence on child outcomes was largest when the violent crime took place within a short distance from children's homes and within a short time period prior to assessment...

Below:  Approximate Locationa of Participant Homes and Total Violent Crimes by 2000 Census Tract.

aAlthough precise address location was used for actual analyses, dots in Figure 1 represent a random location in children's residential census tract to maintain confidentiality.

Full article at:  http://goo.gl/qemlj0

By:  Dana Charles McCoy,1,2 C. Cybele Raver,1 and Patrick Sharkey1

¹New York University, New York, NY, USA

²Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Corresponding Author: Dana McCoy, Harvard University, Center on the Developing Child, 50 Church St., Rm 415, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: ude.dravrah.esg@yoccm_anad

More at:  https://twitter.com/hiv_insight

And:        http://twitter.com/Prison_Health

The Challenge of Parenting Girls in Neighborhoods of Different Perceived Quality

It is well-known that disadvantaged neighborhoods, as officially identified through census data, harbor higher numbers of delinquent individuals than advantaged neighborhoods. What is much less known is whether parents’ perception of the neighborhood problems predicts low parental engagement with their girls and, ultimately, how this is related to girls’ delinquency, including violence. This paper elucidates these issues by examining data from the Pittsburgh Girls Study, including parent-report of neighborhood problems and level of parental engagement and official records and girl-reported delinquency at ages 15, 16, and 17. Results showed higher stability over time for neighborhood problems and parental engagement than girls’ delinquency. Parents’ perception of their neighborhood affected the extent to which parents engaged in their girls’ lives, but low parental engagement did not predict girls being charged for offending at age 15, 16 or 17. These results were largely replicated for girls’ self-reported delinquency with the exception that low parental engagement at age 16 was predictive of the frequency of girls’ self-reported delinquency at age 17 as well. The results, because of their implications for screening and early interventions, are relevant to policy makers as well as practitioners.

...In the introduction we contrasted two ideas about parenting in different types of neighborhoods. One is that parenting is better in disadvantaged neighborhoods, because parents are aware of the dangers for their children. A contrasting idea is that parenting is worse in disadvantaged compared to advantaged neighborhoods because of the higher concentration of multiple-problem families, and risk factors, and this is more impairing for parenting strategies including parental engagement.

What is a bad neighborhood? Already in the early decades of the twentieth century, criminologists suggested that the closest environment and neighborhood were crucial for criminal or pro social behavior [3,4]. People in disadvantaged neighborhoods are not different from other people, when population turnover is high; the problems tend to stay within the neighborhood and its residents feel less safe. It is not low average income, uneven distribution of race, or fewer resources to schools alone, but all of these factors taken together that lead to a less livable neighborhood. Albert Reiss wrote [23] (p. 2) that “Dangerous places sometimes identify themselves by the visible signs of crime environments such as broken windows, graffiti, vandalized property and drawn iron gates. Still, the common way to think about safe and dangerous communities is to think of them as aggregations of law-abiding and criminal persons”. The current paper does not focus on bad neighborhoods as defined by for example Census, but people’s subjective perceptions. Therefore we did not test for possible differences between low income areas and other areas.

Often the role of the community in shaping citizen morality is highly under-estimated [29,30], and is seldom discussed in relation to parenting and the inevitable interaction with the community. In the current study we found stronger support for parental involvement mediating the impact of neighborhood problems on girls’ self-reported delinquency than on girls’ charges for offending. The results suggest that between ages 15 and 16, parents’ engagement can be counterproductive in that it was associated with higher than lower presence of delinquency (charges and self-reports). However, the magnitude of the coefficients was small when effects were tested within the models. On the other hand, high parental engagement was predictive of lower frequency of girls’ self-reported offending at age 17. It may well be that different aspects of parental engagement, such as supervision and involvement are differently related to girls’ offending later.

One of the key questions in this study was whether overall the results would replicate when using official charges and self-reported delinquency, despite the prominent difference in prevalence and correspondence between the two. We found that over all, the model replicated well.

Full article at: http://goo.gl/xvkN9m

By: Lia Ahonen,* Rolf Loeber, Alison Hipwell, and Stephanie Stepp

Life History Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, 201 N Craig Street, Suite 408, Pittsburgh, PA 15218, USA

Rolf Loeber: ude.cmpu@rrebeol; Alison Hipwell: ude.cmpu@allewpih; Stephanie Stepp: ude.cmpu@dsppets

^*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; Email: ude.cmpu@lnenoha; Tel.: +1-412-383-5017

   

More at:  https://twitter.com/hiv_insight

And: http://twitter.com/Prison_Health