Search Results
Title: The Effect of Neighborhood Context on Obesity and Educational Achievement among Youth
Resulting in 1 citation.
| 1. |
Alvarado, Steven Elias |
|
The Effect of Neighborhood Context on Obesity and Educational Achievement among Youth Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, 2011 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Educational Outcomes; Geocoded Data; Hispanic Studies; Mobility, Residential; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Neighborhood Effects; Obesity; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Weight Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This dissertation investigates the effect of neighborhood social context on obesity and educational achievement among youth. I use restricted geo-coded panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) between 1986 and 2008 and a within-child fixed effects approach to identify causal effects for movers and stayers separately. The fixed effects approach takes advantage of repeated measures of independent and dependent variables in order to eliminate bias that is due to time-invariant unobserved characteristics of children and families. Among the general sample of youth, the results suggest that long-term exposure to neighborhood unemployment increases the odds of being obese while moving to affluence decreases the odds of being obese. Among Black youth, long-term exposure to neighborhood unemployment also increases the odds of being obese while Latino youth were sensitive only to a more recent exposure to neighborhood unemployment. Among the general sample of youth, gentrification increases achievement scores. Among poor and urban Black children and poor and urban Latino children, exposure to neighborhood unemployment and neighborhood poverty generally reduces achievement scores. Moreover, the negative effects of neighborhood unemployment and neighborhood poverty are stronger among disadvantaged youth compared to the general sample of youth. Surprisingly, Black neighbors increase the achievement scores of poor and urban minority youth while neighborhood unemployment increases achievement among poor and urban Latinos. Among poor and urban minority youth, gentrification has no effect on achievement scores while moving severely disadvantaged Latinos to affluence decreases their achievement scores. |
|
|
Bibliography Citation
Alvarado, Steven Elias. The Effect of Neighborhood Context on Obesity and Educational Achievement among Youth. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, 2011. |