ABSTRACT
The concentration of health and behavior problems among children and adolescents living in inner city neighborhoods in the United States has been the subject of more than a decade of intensive research dedicated to identifying and explaining the neighborhood effects stemming from the residential concentration of poverty posited in Wilson’s (1987) seminal formulations of this problem. As noted elsewhere in this volume, these posited neighborhood effects have proved notoriously difficult to isolate. What once seemed a relatively straightforward scientific undertaking, that of demonstrating additive effects of neighborhood disadvantage over and above those of family and individual disadvantage, has proved an extraordinary challenge. If nothing else, we now know that concepts such as neighborhood and community are vastly more complex than we used to think and require considerable theoretical work and sophistication of measurement in order to be operationalized in scientific research.
