Neighborhood Advantage, Relative Status, and Violence Among Foreign-Born Adolescents

Abstract

Immigrant families and contexts are protective for delinquency, even though recent immigrants are more likely to be poor and reside in disadvantaged settings. Yet it is unclear whether the protective effects of immigrant status depend on the match between family SES and neighborhood advantage. This study examines the interplay among immigrant status, family SES, and neighborhood advantage in predicting adolescent violence. Using multilevel longitudinal data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (N = 1,908), findings show that first-generation adolescents from low-SES families have the highest odds of violence in the most advantaged contexts, exceeding that of even third-generation adolescents. In contrast, high-SES first-generation adolescents have the highest probability of violence in less advantaged contexts, but the lowest in the most advantaged neighborhoods. The results identify conditions under which the protective nature of immigrant status is eroded, and highlight the importance of relative status for understanding violence among foreign-born adolescents.

Keywords:

• immigrants
• adolescents
• neighborhoods
• violence
• SES

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous reviewers, and am indebted to my Summer Research Institute 2012 cohort and the Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network at The Ohio State University, Dana Haynie, Tim Wadsworth, Ruth Peterson, Lauren Krivo, Chris Browning, Casey Harris, Derek Kreager, Molly Martin, Dennis Condron, Maria Paino, and Henri Gooren.

Notes

¹ Families where the primary caregiver was unpartnered and unemployed for more than 5 years were assigned an occupational prestige score of 10, a half a standard deviation away from the lowest score on the original scale.

² An unconditional three-level Rasch model was first estimated to generate level-2 and level-3 variance components (not shown). The level-3 variance component estimate, measuring the extent to which violence varies across neighborhoods, is significant at p < .001. The intra-class correlation (the proportion of the variance that is between neighborhoods, approximated given the logistic outcome) for the violence scale is .10.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lori A. Burrington

Lori A. Burrington is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice at Oakland University. Her research focuses on contextual determinants of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in adolescent and young adult problem and health-risk behaviors.