Moving to Collective Efficacy: How Inner-City Mobility Impacts Minority and Immigrant Youth Victimization and Violence

Despite much recent attention devoted to understanding the consequences of residential mobility, especially negative consequences for youth (Sampson, 2008; Sharkey and Sampson, 2010), there is scant research exploring how inner-city mobility impacts youth violence and victimization among minorities and immigrants. Youth who move within city limits may enter a new neighborhood that is contextually the same, better, or worse than their original neighborhood, and these changes may influence youth negative outcomes. However, to date, few studies have examined the extent to which moving within a city affects minority and immigrant youth delinquent behavior, particularly in relation to changes in neighborhood collective efficacy; a major characteristic shaping community crime rates and youth violence.
The three main goals of this project are to: (1) understand how inner-city mobility of minority and immigrant youth affects engagement in violence and victimization; (2) examine whether vertical or horizontal mobility with respect to key neighborhood factors differentially influences minority and immigrant youth outcomes; and (3) determine who fares better – youth who vertically move (to better or worse neighborhoods), those who do not move, or those who horizontally move. Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, we focus on inner-city mobility and examine how upward or downward mobility in terms of collective efficacy (i.e., moving to or from a neighborhood with greater levels of collective efficacy) affects minority and immigrant youth violence, victimization, and other key behaviors that may shape youth outcomes. Data are drawn from both the Longitudinal Cohort Study and Community Survey. Research has shown that compared to white youth, minorities not only tend to be exposed to higher levels of community violence but also engage in more violence whereas immigrant youth tend to experience but not engage in violence. Therefore, the study of inner-city residential mobility will permit an examination of how neighborhood contexts may influence these behaviors and perhaps further explain much discussed differences in minority and immigrant youth outcomes. The diversity of the PHDCN and information on mobility from Wave 1 to 2 and Wave 2 to 3 makes these data ideally suited to the current project. Further, the rich data from the Community Survey affords the opportunity to examine how previously understudied community characteristics like collective efficacy, disorder, and indicators of social disorganization can impact a variety of youth behaviors among at-risk youth. ca/ncf