ABSTRACT
That youth delinquency and antisocial behavior relate to community characteristics such as poverty level, ethnic heterogeneity, and residential mobility, particularly in urban communities, was one of the earliest empirical findings supporting an ecological perspective on the development of delinquency and violence (Shaw & McKay, 1942). Recently, there has been resurgent interest in community effects on youth development, expanding this perspective to show that community economic and social conditions affect not only involvement in delinquent and criminal behavior but also other aspects of child development (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, Klebenov, & Sealand, 1993; Bursik, 1988; Chase-Lansdale, Gordon, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanov, 1997; Coulton, Korbin, Su, & Chow, 1995; Ensminger, Lamkin, & Jacobson, 1996; Sampson, 1997; Sampson & Groves, 1989). Much of the recent research has been spurred by the work of William Julius Wilson. In The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, Wilson (1987) argued that the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, the shift of jobs from cities to suburbs, and the flight of the minority middle class from the inner cities led to increasingly concentrated poverty in urban areas. The number of neighborhoods with poverty rates that exceed 40%, a threshold definition of extreme poverty or underclass neighborhoods, rose precipitously. Wilson argued that as a result, people living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty had become isolated from job networks, mainstream institutions, and role models and that this isolation was related to a number of problems including school dropout and the proliferation of single-parent fami-
Deborah Gorman-Smith University of Illinois at Chicago
lies. With this increased focus on the characteristics of inner-city life came interest in understanding what this context meant for children’s development (see for example Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, & Aber, 1997; Duncan & BrooksGunn, 1997).
