Search results

In 1993, I received funding to conduct a community-based survey of adolescents living in public housing neighborhoods. While the ethnography literature warns about the emotional risks associated with field work, the survey research literature is silent about these risks, and I was largely unprepared about what to expect. This paper documents the experience of contacting over 600 youths in public housing neighborhoods, obtaining parental consent, scheduling a time and place to conduct the survey, and actually conducting it. It shows that the process of conducting this survey was much more like an ethnographic study than a strict survey. From this perspective, it also discusses insights I gained about life in public housing, and shares some of the stories of the people who live there.

Over the past 30 years, urban policies in such areas as public health, housing, economic development, and education have consistently been undercut by unexpected opposition. This is partially attributable to the ambiguity inherent in politics, but it also derives from the inability of policymakers to examme systematically the political process and its implications for successful policy development. We suggest the decision seminar, a problem-solving tool developed by Harold Lasswell, as a means for clarifying the ambiguity of the political process and allowing policymakers to understand better community undercurrents ofsupport for and opposition to any policy proposal. Based on our examination of several successful decision seminars, we suggest conditions and practices necessary to maximize the effectiveness of a decision seminar.

This research considers how empowerment, sense of community, and neighboring behavior affect the likelihood that residents living in high-poverty neighborhoods engage in discussion about community issues (i.e., teen pregnancy, STDs, and violence) that directly affect their lives and the lives of their neighbors. The present study is conducted in homogeneous, very high-poverty (i.e., public housing) neighborhoods located in a moderate-size city. Data generated by telephone interviews with 257 public housing residents show that sense of community and neighboring behaviors, but not empowerment, are predictors of discussion about these issues, with neighboring behaviors being the most important. Neighboring behaviors also predicted working with others to solve neighborhood problems and contacting elected officials about neighborhood issues. Based on these findings, the viability of different organizing strategies that might be applied to high-poverty, inner-city neighborhoods is explored.

This study assessed bidirectional relationships among supportive parenting (knowledge), negative parenting (permissiveness), and deviance in a sample (N = 5,325) of poor, inner‐city African American youth from the Mobile Youth Survey over 4 years. Cross‐lagged path analysis provided evidence of significant bidirectional paths among parenting processes (knowledge and permissiveness) and deviance over time. Follow‐up multigroup tests provided only modest evidence of dissimilar relationships by sex and by developmental periods. The findings improve our understanding of developmental changes between parenting behaviors and deviance during adolescence and extend current research of the bidirectionality of parent and child relationships among inner‐city African American youth.

This study examined the effects of racial discrimination, community violence, and stressful life events on internalizing problems among African American youth from high‐poverty neighborhoods (N = 607; 293 boys; Mage = 16.0 years, SD = 1.44 years). Mediated effects via externalizing problems on these relations were also examined, given the high comorbidity rate between internalizing and externalizing problems. Externalizing problems partially mediated the effect of stressful life events on internalizing problems and fully mediated the effect of racial discrimination for boys but not for girls. Exposure to violence had a significant indirect effect on internalizing problems via externalizing problems. The findings call for greater attention to internalizing problems among African American youth and pathways to internalizing problems via externalizing problems.