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Increasingly, the broader public, media and policymakers are looking to qualitative research to provide answers to our most pressing social questions. While an exciting and perhaps overdue moment for qualitative researchers, it is also a time when the method is coming under increasing scrutiny for a lack of reliability and transparency. The question of how to assess the quality of qualitative research is therefore paramount, but the field still lacks clear standards to evaluate qualitative work. In their new book, Qualitative Literacy, Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco aim to fill this gap. I argue that Qualitative Literacy offers a compelling set of standards for consumers to assess whether an in-depth interview or participant observation was of sufficient quality and, to an extent, whether sufficient time was spent in the field. However, by ignoring the vital importance of employing systematic, well-justified, and transparent sampling strategies, the implication is that such essential criteria can be ignored, undermining the potential contribution of qualitative research to a more cumulative creation of scientific knowledge.

Recent events have brought attention to the millions of Americans who struggle to find and pay for housing. Housing has historically been of interest to sociologists, but it has long been subsumed within research on crime, residential mobility, and neighborhoods. In the past decade, there has been a surge of scholarship in an emerging sociology of housing that focuses on housing insecurity, forced moves, landlords, shared housing arrangements, and the stratification effects of housing policy. While other fields typically define housing insecurity as affordability, this new literature shows how housing insecurity is not only rooted in financial constraints but also situated within social relationships that create or dissolve housing arrangements, and is exacerbated or remediated by supply-side institutions and policy. This work makes clear that housing insecurity is not a one-time discrete event but a dynamic process, and that sociologists can contribute not only to measuring housing insecurity but also to understanding the social forces that shape it.

We performed a secondary analysis of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) social experiment to investigate the impact of different types of housing assistance and neighborhood environments on long-term ...

ImportanceStructural racism has been implicated in the disproportionally high asthma morbidity experienced by children living in disadvantaged, urban neighborhoods. Current approaches designed to reduce asthma triggers have modest impact.ObjectiveTo examine whether participation in a housing mobility program that provided housing vouchers and assistance moving to low-poverty neighborhoods was associated with reduced asthma morbidity among children and to explore potential mediating factors.Design, Setting, and ParticipantsCohort study of 123 children aged 5 to 17 years with persistent asthma whose families participated in the Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership housing mobility program from 2016 to 2020. Children were matched to 115 children enrolled in the Urban Environment and Childhood Asthma (URECA) birth cohort using propensity scores.ExposureMoving to a low-poverty neighborhood.Main OutcomesCaregiver-reported asthma exacerbations and symptoms.ResultsAmong 123 children enrolled in the program, median age was 8.4 years, 58 (47.2%) were female, and 120 (97.6%) were Black. Prior to moving, 89 of 110 children (81%) lived in a high-poverty census tract (>20% of families below the poverty line); after moving, only 1 of 106 children with after-move data (0.9%) lived in a high-poverty tract. Among this cohort, 15.1% (SD, 35.8) had at least 1 exacerbation per 3-month period prior to moving vs 8.5% (SD, 28.0) after moving, an adjusted difference of −6.8 percentage points (95% CI, −11.9% to −1.7%; P = .009). Maximum symptom days in the past 2 weeks were 5.1 (SD, 5.0) before moving and 2.7 (SD, 3.8) after moving, an adjusted difference of −2.37 days (95% CI, −3.14 to −1.59; P Conclusions and RelevanceChildren with asthma whose families participated in a program that helped them move into low-poverty neighborhoods experienced significant improvements in asthma symptom days and exacerbations. This study adds to the limited evidence suggesting that programs to counter housing discrimination can reduce childhood asthma morbidity.

Despite decades of research on residential mobility and neighborhood effects, we know comparatively less about how people sort across geography. In recent years, scholars have been calling for research that considers residential selection as a social stratification process. In this paper, we present findings from work our team has done over the last 17 years to explore how people end up living where they do, relying in large part on systematically sampled in–depth narrative interviews with families. We focus on four key decisions: whether to move; where to move; whether to send children to school in the neighborhood; and whether to rent or own a home. We found that many residential mobility decisions among the poor were “reactive,” with unpredictable shocks forcing families out of their homes. As a result of reactive moving, housing search time frames became shorter and poor parents employed short–term survival solutions to secure housing instead of long–term investment thinking about neighborhood and school district quality. These shocks, constraints, and compressed time frames led parents to decouple some dimensions of neighborhoods and schools from the housing search process while maximizing others, like immediacy of shelter, unit quality, and proximity to work and child care. Finally, we found that policies can significantly shape and better support some of these decisions. Combined, our research revealed some of the processes that underlie locational attainment and the intergenerational transmission of neighborhood context.

We examine how disadvantaged students make postsecondary education decisions, focusing on why they often opt for short, flexible programs that tend to have low returns in the labor market. Prior literature emphasizes information deficits and financial constraints. We draw upon qualitative data collected via open-ended interviews conducted with a sample of economically disadvantaged Black youth in Baltimore. We use these data to develop and explore a complementary narrative: students who have faced instability or hardship in the form of disruptive events, or “adverse shocks” (e.g., violence, eviction or incarceration of a family member), anticipate future shocks that could derail their educational plans. In response, they opt for shorter, more flexible educational programs that they expect they can complete despite anticipated shocks. When possible, we corroborate this narrative using publicly available, large-N data sets such as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Finally, we formalize this narrative as a simple dynamic structural model calibrated using data on education choices and returns. The model clarifies that it is impossible to identify costs of schooling without data on beliefs about the probability of non-completion, thus providing guidance on future data collection priorities. More broadly, our approach demonstrates a novel application of mixed methods research: using qualitative data to aid in the specification of a structural model. This approach could be applied in other contexts where behavior is poorly understood and extant data do not contain all of the information needed to generate and test plausible hypotheses.

Residential selection is central in determining children’s housing, neighborhood, and school contexts, and an extensive literature considers the social processes that shape residential searches and attainment. While this literature typically frames the residential search as a uniform process oriented around finding residential options with desired characteristics, we examine whether individuals may differentially conceive of these searches in ways that sustain inequality in residential attainment. Drawing on repeated, in-depth interviews with a stratified random sample of 156 households with young children in two metropolitan counties, we find that parents exhibit distinct residential search logics, informed by the constraints they face. Higher-income families usually engage in purposive searches oriented around their residential preferences. They search for “forever homes” that will meet their families’ needs for years to come. In contrast, low-income parents typically draw on a logic of deferral. While they hope to eventually search for a home with the unit, neighborhood, and school characteristics they desire, aspirations for homeownership lead them to conceive of their moves (which are often between rental units) as “temporary stops,” which justifies accepting homes that are inconsistent with their long-term preferences. In addition, because they are often “pushed” to move by negative circumstances, they focus on their immediate housing needs and, in the most extreme cases, adopt an “anywhere but here” approach. These logics constitute an unexamined mechanism through which economic resources shape residential searches and ultimate attainment.

Despite frequent moves, low–income black families are more likely than any other group to churn among disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the least likely to escape them. Traditional explanations for neighborhood inequality invoke racial preferences and barriers to living in high–income neighborhoods, but recent work suggests that it is also involuntary mobility—such as eviction—which predicts the neighborhood destinations of poor African American families in urban areas. However, we know little about how individuals actually make residential decisions under such unplanned and constrained conditions. Using longitudinal interviews with low–income African–American families residing in Mobile, AL, and Baltimore, MD, we describe the array of factors that lead poor black families to move, and describe how families secure housing in the wake of unplanned mobility. We observe that moving among the poor is more reactive than it is voluntary: Approximately 70 percent of most recent moves are catalyzed by landlords, housing quality failures, and violence. We show how this reactive mobility both accelerates and hampers residential selection in ways that may reproduce neighborhood context and inequality. Where mobility is characterized by a greater degree of agency, we show that the strategies families use to make decisions often prohibit them from investigating a wider range of residential options.

In this article, the author explores how residential mobility and neighborhood-level change are connected over time. In particular, he asks whether and how neighborhood change trajectories in Chica...

To succeed, the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program must be attractive to rental property owners. When landlords refuse to accept subsidized renters, lease-up rates decline, administrative costs i...

Importance Although neighborhoods are thought to be an important health determinant, evidence for the relationship between neighborhood poverty and health care use is limited, as prior studies have largely used observational data without an experimental design. Objective To examine whether housing policies that reduce exposure to high-poverty neighborhoods were associated with differences in long-term hospital use among adults and children. Design, Setting, and Participants Exploratory analysis of the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program, a randomized social experiment conducted in 5 US cities. From 1994 to 1998, 4604 families in public housing were randomized to 1 of 3 groups: a control condition, a traditional Section 8 voucher toward rental costs in the private market, or a voucher that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods. Participants were linked to all-payer hospital discharge data (1995 through 2014 or 2015) and Medicaid data (1999 through 2009). The final follow-up date ranged from 11 to 21 years after randomization. Exposures Receipt of a traditional or low-poverty voucher vs control group. Main Outcomes and Measures Rates of hospitalizations and hospital days, and hospital spending. Results Among 4602 eligible individuals randomized as adults, 4072 (88.5%) were linked to health data (mean age, 33 years [SD, 9.0 years]; 98% female; median follow-up, 11 years). There were no significant differences in primary outcomes among adults randomized to receive a voucher compared with the control group (unadjusted hospitalization rate, 14.0 vs 14.7 per 100 person-years, adjusted incidence rate ratio [IRR], 0.95 [95% CI, 0.84-1.08;P = .45]; hospital days, 62.8 vs 67.0 per 100 person-years; IRR, 0.93 [95% CI, 0.77-1.13;P = .46]; yearly spending, $2075 vs $1977; adjusted difference, −$129 [95% CI, −$497 to $239;P = .49]). Among 11 290 eligible individuals randomized as children, 9118 (80.8%) were linked to health data (mean age, 8 years [SD, 4.6 years]; 49% female; median follow-up, 11 years). Receipt of a housing voucher during childhood was significantly associated with lower hospitalization rates (6.3 vs 7.3 per 100 person-years; IRR, 0.85 [95% CI, 0.73-0.99;P = .03]) and yearly inpatient spending ($633 vs $785; adjusted difference, −$143 [95% CI, −$256 to −$31;P = .01]) and no significant difference in hospital days (25.7 vs 28.8 per 100 person-years; IRR, 0.92 [95% CI, 0.77-1.11;P = .41]). Conclusions and Relevance In this exploratory analysis of a randomized housing voucher intervention, adults who received a housing voucher did not experience significant differences in hospital use or spending. Receipt of a voucher during childhood was significantly associated with lower rates of hospitalization and less inpatient spending during long-term follow-up.

Families using the Housing Choice Voucher Program rarely experience large gains in neighborhood or school quality when compared with unassisted poor renters. Research on housing mobility programs has reached mixed conclusions about whether vouchers can improve neighborhood and school quality, especially in the long term. We revisit these findings using new data from the partial remedy to the Thompson v. HUD desegregation case in Baltimore, known as the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program (BHMP). Through targeted vouchers, intensive counseling and innovative policy features, the BHMP helped families move to low-poverty, nonsegregated neighborhoods with higher performing school districts. We examine residential outcomes for the first 1,800 families that moved through the program for a period of up to 9 years. We find that BHMP families moved to more integrated and affluent neighborhoods, in school districts with more qualified teachers and fewer poor students—and most families stayed in these neighbo...

Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such as affordability or proximity to family and jobs. An alternative explanation is that they do not move to high-opportunity areas because of barriers that prevent them from making such moves. We test between these two explanations using a randomized controlled trial with housing voucher recipients in Seattle and King County. We provided services to reduce barriers to moving to high-upward-mobility neighborhoods: customized search assistance, landlord engagement, and short-term financial assistance. Unlike many previous housing mobility programs, families using vouchers were not required to move to a high-opportunity neighborhood to receive a voucher. The intervention increased the fraction of families who moved to high-upward-mobility areas from 15% in the control group to 53% in the treatment group. Families induced to move to higher opportunity areas by the treatment do not make sacrifices on other aspects of neighborhood quality, tend to stay in their new neighborhoods when their leases come up for renewal, and report higher levels of neighborhood satisfaction after moving. These findings imply that most low-income families do not have a strong preference to stay in low-opportunity areas; instead, barriers in the housing search process are a central driver of residential segregation by income. Interviews with families reveal that the capacity to address each family's needs in a specific manner — from emotional support to brokering with landlords to customized financial assistance — was critical to the program's success. Using quasi-experimental analyses and comparisons to other studies, we show that more standardized policies — increasing voucher payment standards in high-opportunity areas or informational interventions — have much smaller impacts. We conclude that redesigning affordable housing policies to provide customized assistance in housing search could reduce residential segregation and increase upward mobility substantially.

Increasing numbers of low-income and minority youth are now pursuing shorter-duration sub-baccalaureate credentials at for-profit trade and technical schools. However, many students drop out of these schools, leaving with large debts and few job prospects. Despite these dismal outcomes, we know very little about students’ experiences in for-profit programs and how these institutions shape postsecondary attainment. Using data from fieldwork with 150 inner-city African American youth, we examine why disadvantaged youth are attracted to these schools and why they struggle to complete certifications. In contrast to previous research, we find that the youth in our study have quite modest ambitions and look to for-profit trade schools as the quickest and most direct route to work. However, youth receive little information or guidance to support such postsecondary transitions. Therefore, the very element that makes for-profit trade school programs seem the most appealing—a curriculum focused on one particular career—becomes an obstacle when it requires youth to commit to a program of study before they have explored their interests. When youth realize they do not like or are not prepared for their chosen career, they adopt coping strategies that keep them in school but swirling between programs, rather than accumulating any credentials.

We use multiple longitudinal data sources and propensity score matching to assess the long-term outcomes of the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI) in the Sandtown-Winchester community of Baltimore. This comprehensive community initiative, implemented in the 1990s, remains one of the most well-known urban revitalization projects in the country, due to its significant funding (more than $100 million) and comprehensive approach to neighborhood redevelopment, including housing construction, education reform, and employment services. We find significant increases in homeownership and reductions in unemployment in Sandtown. However, there were limited gains elsewhere, as poverty remained high and local schools did not show sustained improvement. Our findings speak to the durability of social inequality in high-poverty and racially segregated neighborhoods, and underscore the need to further develop rigorous standards for research that evaluates community-level interventions.

BackgroundHigh school choice policies attempt to improve the educational outcomes of poor and minority students by allowing access to high school beyond neighborhood boundaries. These policies assume that given a choice, families will be able to select a school that supports their child's learning and promotes educational attainment. However, research on the effects of public school choice programs on the academic achievement of disadvantaged students is mixed, suggesting that families do not necessarily respond to these programs in ways that policymakers intend.PurposeThe purpose of this article is to identify how family and neighborhood contexts interact with public school choice policies to shape the educational opportunities of inner-city students. Specifically, we ask: What criteria are used to choose schools? What are the implications of these school choice decisions for students’ future educational and occupational opportunities?Research DesignWe use data from interviews and fieldwork conducted with 118 low-income African American youth ages 15–24 who attended Baltimore City Public Schools at some point during their high school career. Research on school choice tends to rely on data from parents, and we offer a unique contribution by asking youth themselves about their experiences with school choice.ConclusionsAlthough school choice policies assume that parents will guide youths’ decision about where to go to high school, the majority of youth in our sample were the primary decision makers in the high school choice process. Additionally, these youth made these choices under considerable constraints imposed by the district policy and by their family, peers, and academic background. As a result, the youth often selected a school within a very limited choice set and chose schools that did not necessarily maximize their educational opportunity. Our results demonstrate that school choice policies must take into account the social context in which educational decisions are made in order to maximize chances for students’ individual academic achievement and to decrease inequality by race and social class.

Research on the housing choice voucher program and housing mobility interventions shows that even with assistance, it is difficult for poor minority families to relocate to, and remain in, low-poverty neighborhoods. Scholars suggest that both structural forces and individual preferences help explain these residential patterns. However, less attention is paid to where preferences come from, and how they respond to policies and social structure to shape residential decisionmaking. In this paper, we use data from fieldwork with 110 participants in the Baltimore Mobility Program (BMP), an assisted mobility voucher program, to demonstrate how residential preferences can shift over time as a function of living in higher opportunity neighborhoods. Since 2003, BMP has helped over 2,000 low-income African American families move from high-poverty, highly segregated neighborhoods in Baltimore City to low-poverty, racially mixed neighborhoods throughout the Baltimore region. Along with intensive counseling and unique program administration, these new neighborhood contexts helped many women to shift what we term residential choice frameworks: the criteria that families use to assess housing and neighborhoods. Parents who participated in the mobility program raised their expectations for what neighborhoods, homes, and schools can provide for their children and themselves. Parents report new preferences for the "quiet" of suburban locations, and strong consideration of school quality and neighborhood diversity when thinking about where to live. Our findings suggest that housing policies should employ counseling to ensure relocation to and sustained residence in low-poverty communities. Our work also underscores how social structure, experience, and policy opportunities influence preferences, and how these preferences, in turn, affect policy outcomes. Language: en

Individuals participating in the HUD Housing Choice Voucher program, formerly Section 8, can rent units in the private market and are not tied to public housing projects in a specific neighborhood. We would expect vouchers to help poor families leave the ghetto and move to more diverse communities with higher socioeconomic opportunity, but many voucher holders remain concentrated in poor, segregated communities. We use longitudinal qualitative data from one hundred low-income African American families in Mobile, Alabama, to explore this phenomenon, finding that tenants’ limited housing search resources, involuntary mobility, landlord practices, and several aspects of the voucher program itself limit families’ ability to escape disadvantaged areas. We also find that the voucher program’s regulations and funding structures do not incentivize housing authorities to promote neighborhood mobility and residential choice. This combination of forces often keeps voucher recipients in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poor and minority residents.

Over 20 years of scholarship suggests that living in America's poorest and most dangerous communities diminishes the life course development of children and adults. In the 1990s, the dire conditions of some of these neighborhoods, especially those with large public housing developments, prompted significant policy responses. In addition to the demolition and redevelopment of some of the projects, the federal government launched an experiment to help families leave poor neighborhoods through an assisted housing voucher program called Moving to Opportunity (MTO). While families who moved through this program initially relocated to census tracts with poverty rates almost four times lower than their original projects, many returned to communities of moderate to high poverty. Why? We use mixed methods to explore the patterns and the decision–making processes behind moves among MTO families. Focusing on the Baltimore MTO site, we find that traditional theories for residential choice did not fully explain these outcomes. While limited access to public transportation, housing quality problems, and landlords made it hard for families to move to, or stay in, low–poverty neighborhoods, there were also more striking explanations for their residential trajectories. Many families valued the low–poverty neighborhoods they were originally able to access with their vouchers, but when faced with the need to move again, they often sacrificed neighborhood quality for dwelling quality in order to accommodate changing family needs. Having lived in high–poverty neighborhoods most of their lives, they developed a number of coping strategies and beliefs that made them confident they could handle such a consequential trade–off and protect themselves and their children from the dangers of poorer areas.

Youth who switch schools are more likely to demonstrate a wide array of negative behavioral and educational outcomes, including dropping out of high school. However, whether switching schools actually puts youth at risk for dropout is uncertain, since youth who switch schools are similar to dropouts in their levels of prior school achievement and engagement, which suggests that switching schools may be part of the same long-term developmental process of disengagement that leads to dropping out. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study uses propensity score matching to pair youth who switched high schools with similar youth who stayed in the same school. We find that while over half the association between switching schools and dropout is explained by observed characteristics prior to ninth grade, switching schools is still associated with dropout. Moreover, the relationship between switching schools and dropout varies depending on a youth’s propensity for switching schools.

“ … autonomy should refer instead to decisions reached with a full and vivid awareness of available opportunities, with reference to all relevant information and without illegitimate or excessive c...

Unlike traditional research on educational stratification that focuses on the pursuit of higher education, our study examines why young adults do not make the transition to college, using a nationally representative sample of college non-enrollees (N = 2640). In applying latent class analysis techniques, we identified multiple types of students who do not pursue college. One group of non-enrollees (27.6%) reports forgoing college because the economic barriers are too high – either because of college affordability or family financial responsibility. These youth had both low math test scores and low family income, and thus closely align with regression-based analyses on college enrollment that emphasize academic and economic constraints as the central barriers to educational progress. However, we also identified a second, often overlooked group of youth who had the academic preparation and family income support to enroll in higher education, but decided to forgo college because they preferred to work and to make money (18.3%). The heterogeneous motives of these youth suggest that postsecondary decisions are not always guided by academic and economic barriers, but sometimes driven by previous work experience and perceptions of local opportunities for school and work.

BackgroundPrevious research has demonstrated that children growing up in poor communities have limited access to high-performing schools, while more affluent neighborhoods tend to have higher-ranking schools and more opportunities for after-school programs and activities. Therefore, many researchers and policy makers expected not only that the families moving to low-poverty neighborhoods with the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program would gain access to zone schools with more resources but also that mothers would be more likely to meet middle-class parents who could provide information about academic programs and teachers, leading them to choose some of these new higher-quality-zone schools. However, research evaluating the effects of the MTO program on child outcomes 4-7 years after program moves found that while the schools attended by the MTO children were less poor and had higher average test scores than their original neighborhood schools, the differences were small: Before moving with the program, MTO children attended schools ranked at the 15th percentile statewide on average; 4-7 years after the move, they were attending schools that ranked at the 24th percentile on average.PurposeThe fact that the residential changes brought about by the MTO experiment did not translate into much larger gains in school academic quality provides the impetus for our study. In other words, we explore why the experiment did not lead to the school changes that researchers and policy makers expected. With survey, census, and school-level data, we examine where families moved with the MTO program and how these moves related to changes in school characteristics, and how parents considered schooling options.SettingAlthough the MTO experiment took place in five cities (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore), we use data from the Baltimore site only.PopulationThe sample in our study includes the low-income mothers and children who participated in the Baltimore site of the MTO housing voucher experiment. Ninety-seven percent of the families were headed by single black women. The median number of children was two, and average household income was extremely low, at $6,750. Over 60% received Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) as their primary source of income (at program entry in 1994), over 77% of household heads were unemployed, and 40% of the women had no high school degree or GED.ProgramThe Moving to Opportunity program gave public housing residents in extremely poor neighborhoods in Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston a chance to apply for the program and move between 1994 and 1998. Families were randomly assigned into one of three groups: an experimental group that received housing counseling and a special voucher that could only be used in census tracts with 1990 poverty rates of less than 10%; a second treatment group, the Section 8 group, that received a regular voucher with no geographic restrictions on where they could move; and a control group that received no voucher through MTO, although they could continue to reside in their public housing units or apply for other housing subsidies (usually a regular Section 8 voucher). The program did not provide assistance with transportation costs, job searches, or local school information after the family relocated.Research DesignWe use survey data, census data, school-level data, and interviews from the Baltimore site of a randomized field trial of a housing voucher program. We present a mixed-methods case study of one site of the experiment to understand why the children of families who participated in the Baltimore MTO program did not experience larger gains in schooling opportunity.ConclusionsOur article demonstrates that in order to discover whether social programs will be effective, we need to understand how the conditions of life for poor families facilitate or constrain their ability to engage new structural opportunities. The described case examples demonstrate why we need to integrate policies and interventions that target schooling in conjunction with housing, mental health services, and employment assistance. Future programs should train mobility counselors to inform parents about the new schooling choices in the area, help them weigh the pros and cons of changing their children's schools, and explain some of the important elements of academic programs and how they could help their children's educational achievement. Counselors could also assuage parents’ fears about transferring their children to new schools by making sure that receiving schools have information about the children and that little instruction time is lost in the transition between schools.

Over the past half century, a large body of theoretical and empirical work in sociology and other social sciences has emphasized the negative consequences of mobility for human development in general, and youth outcomes in particular. In criminology, decades of research have documented a link between residential mobility and crime at both the macro and micro levels. At the micro level, mobility is associated with delinquency, substance use, and other deviant behaviors among adolescents. However, it is possible that the relationship between mobility and delinquency may be due to selection on pre-existing differences between mobile and non-mobile youth in their propensity for delinquency, and prior studies have not adequately addressed this issue. Specifically, the families that are most likely to move are also the most disadvantaged and may be characterized by dynamics and processes that are conducive to the development of delinquency and problem behavior in their children. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to assess the impact of residential and school mobility between the ages of 12 and 17 on delinquency and substance use. Random effects models control for selection on both observed and unobserved differences. Results show that mobility and delinquency are indeed spuriously related. Implications for future research on mobility and outcomes are discussed.

In this article, we present multiple assertions relevant to the plight of students who are underserved and structurally positioned to transition out of school unable to access labor market rewards. First, we juxtapose economic realities against collective ideologies about the role of education in creating opportunities for individuals. Second, we discuss conceptual understandings of “tracking” with a particular focus on the role of subbaccalaureate education in the tracking and transition process. Third, we propose to dismantle dichotomous notions of “career” and “college” preparation to expand opportunities for underserved students and reduce inequities by preparing all students for both college and work options simultaneously.

Despite years of research, methodological and practical obstacles make it difficult to conclude whether policies aimed at improving schools and communities are effective for improving youth outcomes. To complement existing work, we assess research on the educational and social outcomes for comparable youth who change school and neighborhood settings through unique housing policy and school voucher programs. Research shows that housing programs have helped poor families move to much safer, less disadvantaged, and less segregated neighborhoods. Some housing programs have also provided early educational benefits for young people who relocated to less poor and less segregated neighborhoods, but these gains were not maintained in the long run. School voucher programs have helped disadvantaged youth attend higher-performing private schools in less segregated environments with more middle-class peers. Although some voucher programs have shown small positive effects, the results of others are less certain owing to methodological weaknesses. Future research should directly examine families’ selection processes and be cautious with quantitative research that uses naturally occurring variation to model the effects of potential social programs. Researchers should also recognize the family processes that interact with social policy to determine how youth development can be improved, alongside the structural and political processes that condition how programs work at a larger scale.

Policy reforms try to improve education or employment while individuals remain in the same locations – these reforms often fail. Such policies may be fighting an uphill battle as long as individuals live in the same social contexts. Findings from Chicago’s Gautreaux programme suggest that residential mobility is a possible lever. By moving into more advantaged neighbourhoods, with higher-quality schools and better labour markets, mothers had improved employment rates and children had access to better educational settings and jobs. However, a subsequent mobility programme (MTO) was conducted with a randomised field trial and child and family outcomes were more mixed We speculate about what kinds of moves and social settings are required in order to effect improved economic and social outcomes.

This article uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to investigate high school dropout and its association with the high school curriculum. In particular, it examines how combinations of career and technical education (CTE) and core academic courses influence the likelihood of leaving school. Hazards models indicate a significant curvilinear association between the CTE-to-academic course-taking ratio and the risk of dropping out for youths who were aged 14 and younger when they entered the ninth grade (not old for grade). This finding suggests that a middle-range mix of exposure to CTE and an academic curriculum can strengthen a student's attachment to or motivation while in school. The same association was not found between course taking and the likelihood of dropping out for youths who were aged 15 or older when they entered high school, thus prompting further consideration of the situation of being old for grade in school settings that remain highly age graded in their organization.

This study uses the unique design of the Gautreaux residential mobility program to estimate the long-run impacts of placement neighborhood conditions on the AFDC receipt (N = 793) and employment levels (N = 1258) of low-income Black women. We find that women initially placed in neighborhoods with few Black residents and moderate to high neighborhood resources experienced significantly more time employed when compared with women placed in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of Blacks and a low level of resources. Women placed in neighborhoods with high levels of resources and low Black populations also spent significantly less time on welfare than women placed in highly Black segregated areas with low levels of resources.

In this paper, we examine the antecedents and consequences of timing in the transition from high school to college. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), we find that 16 percent of high school graduates postpone enrollment by seven months or more after completing high school. Delayers tend to have some common characteristics: they come from families with few socioeconomic resources, they have performed poorly on standardized tests, they have dropped out of school, and they have exited high school with a GED. We find that even after controlling for these academic and socioeconomic characteristics, students who delay postsecondary enrollment have lower odds of bachelor degree completion. Additionally, we find that delayers are more likely than on-time enrollees to attend less than four-year institutions and to transition to other roles such as spouses or parents before entering college. Controlling for institutional context and life course contingencies, however, does not completely explain the negative relationship between delayed enrollment and degree completion.

We examined whether the Gautreaux residential mobility program, which moved poor black volunteer families who were living in inner-city Chicago into more-affluent and integrated neighborhoods, produced long-run improvements in the neighborhood environments of the participants. We found that although all the participants moved in the 6 to 22 years since their initial placements, they continued to reside in neighborhoods with income levels that matched those of their placement neighborhoods. Families who were placed in higher-income, mostly white neighborhoods were currently living in the most-affluent neighborhoods. Families who were placed in lower-crime and suburban locations were most likely to reside in low-crime neighborhoods years later.

After describing the distinctive features of various policy models of residential mobility, we examine the long‐term outcomes of the Gautreaux program. Administrative records provide baseline characteristics for all participants, and we located recent addresses for over 99 percent of a random sample of 1,506 participants an average of 14 years after original placement. Although 84 percent of the families made subsequent moves, the racial composition of the current address is strongly related to program placement, even among movers, and after family attributes and premove neighborhood characteristics are controlled. Combined with our prior findings, these results suggest that residential mobility has an enduring, long‐term impact on the residential locations of these families. Contrary to models that assume that families’ enduring preferences will quickly erase these moves, these results suggest the need for further research to consider whether mobility alters preferences or structural barriers.

The culture of poverty model implies that low-income individuals who acquired a low sense of efficacy will retain it, while the geography of opportunity model implies that that they will change if their opportunities improve. The Gautreaux Program moves low-income black families to the city or suburbs in a quasi-random procedure. Participants who moved to higher SES neighbourhoods had higher efficacy and felt safer, which mediated the neighbourhood effects on efficacy. This paper examines which experiences participants identify as having an influence on their sense of efficacy, and the ways those experiences have these effects.

In its recent call to action, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Build a Healthier America noted that nearly a fifth of all Americans live in unhealthy neighborhoods that are marked by limited job opportunities, low-quality housing, pollution, limited access to healthy food, and few opportunities for physical activity, and that nearly half of black children live in particularly unhealthy areas of concentrated poverty.1 Housing mobility programs provide vulnerable populations—including families with children—with resources to escape neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage and move to neighborhoods of socioeconomic opportunity. These programs have the potential to improve population health and reduce health disparities by increasing access to health-promoting neighborhood amenities (e.g. grocery stores, safe recreational spaces, higher quality housing units), reducing exposure to chronic stressors (e.g. violence and crime), altering social networks, and achieving intergenerational increases in socioeconomic status and educational attainment. Prompted in large part by findings from the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (“MTO”), policy makers have begun to ask how to most effectively leverage the nation’s housing programs to maximize health. Increasingly, attention has focused on using housing mobility to target young children. MTO, a randomized controlled trial conducted in the 1990’s, tested whether the offer of counseling, together with a housing voucher that could only be used in a low poverty census tract for the first year of its use, would lead to better outcomes, compared to a traditional housing voucher or remaining in public housing. In practice, the MTO counseling families received was modest, post-move counseling was not provided when families moved a second time (which was a common occurrence), and administrative barriers made it difficult to afford higher rents in opportunity suburbs. As a result, many of families who received a MTO voucher to move to a low poverty area did not relocate and, even among those who did, many returned to high poverty neighborhoods after a short period of time. Despite this, MTO demonstrated that the offer of a voucher to move to a low poverty neighborhood led to improved health outcomes including obesity, diabetes, and rates of physical exercise.2 Recently, Kessler and colleagues found that girls from families who were offered a voucher to move to a low poverty neighborhood had, as adolescents, lower rates of depression and conduct disorders but boys had higher rates of depression, PTSD, and conduct disorders.3 The reasons for these counterintuitive findings for boys are the subject of on-going debate. The MTO results underscore the challenges of using housing vouchers to move to, and then to stay in, neighborhoods of opportunity. The need for housing assistance far exceeds the available resources at the local, state, and national levels in the U.S. The Housing Choice Voucher program is the federal government’s largest rental assistance program. It helps 2.2 million of the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable households afford decent housing in the private market, at an annual cost of about $19 billion.4 The program is an important federal investment designed to reduce worst case housing needs (i.e., the number of households living in substandard housing or experiencing financial hardship by paying more than half their income for housing costs) among very low income households. Housing Choice Vouchers have been criticized for failing to expand access to quality housing for low income families in neighborhoods where jobs, transportation and high quality educational opportunities are greatest. Despite the buying power that the voucher provides, nearly half of the families using vouchers live in high poverty neighborhoods,5 and their children rarely have access to high quality educational opportunities.6 Black voucher participants have even greater difficulty translating this buying power into improved neighborhoods.7 MTO employed a powerful research design, but its health findings offer promise precisely because the “treatment” was a short lived and relatively weak intervention as compared to today’s mobility counseling programs. Today’s programs provide families with stronger supports for longer periods of time to overcome barriers to using vouchers in opportunity neighborhoods. The two largest mobility programs that are now operating, in Dallas and Baltimore, resulted from litigation settlements. In Baltimore, where disparities in life expectancy can vary by as much as 20 years depending on where one lives, over 2,400 families have chosen to move into racially integrated, lower poverty neighborhoods. With on-going post-move assistance, families typically stay in these new neighborhoods, or those that are similar, for many years. Across the nation, however, federal funding for housing mobility programs has been scarce and sporadic. Currently HUD funding for Housing Choice Vouchers covers the cost of the voucher but not the accompanying mobility counseling services that enable minority families to use the voucher to access higher opportunity neighborhoods. Several key gaps must be filled to build support for mobility counseling to be combined with housing vouchers as a health promoting intervention. First, policy makers have suggested that the potential costs of operating mobility programs maybe offset by changes in health care spending over time. Currently, HUD and local housing agencies have little incentive to bear the costs of mobility programs on their budgets if the ‘savings’ accrue to health agencies. Rigorously quantifying the potential cost savings of housing mobility is an important step in better aligning health and housing policy goals and building an evidence base for these agencies to jointly pay for mobility counseling as a potential health and wellness intervention. Second, the optimal way to target mobility programs to obtain the biggest health return on investment remains largely unknown. The agency that oversees Baltimore’s mobility program has recently adopted an early childhood preference, targeting housing vouchers and counseling services to eligible low income families with young children (0 to 8 years old) living in Baltimore City’s poorest neighborhoods. Their reasons are explicitly health-related—evidence suggests that exposure to neighborhoods characterized by violence have a detrimental impact on brain development and long term health outcomes. Measuring health benefits and cost savings that accrue when a family with children moves to better housing in a safer and healthier neighborhood is critical. Additional research is necessary to determine whether mobility counseling might result in health benefits and cost savings for other vulnerable populations, such as those with preexisting diabetes and obesity. At the same time, potential disruptions in health care may be especially salient for patients with preexisting health conditions if families move further away from their doctors or clinics. It is possible that providing counseling about health care resources in new neighborhoods may factor into families’ decisions to move to specific homes and help ease their transition. Finally, clinicians, health care systems, and insurers may play an important role in not only identifying individuals and families who may benefit from a referral to a housing mobility program but also supporting their health as they move. Health care reforms that promote population health management, such as accountable care organizations, may provide an impetus for collaboration with and financial support of mobility programs. Evidence demonstrates that poor families living in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods are exposed to significant health risks. Such evidence also suggests that durable investments in housing programs that help low-income families find and afford housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods can improve health. Quantifying the potential health care savings is critical for aligning incentives and increasing funds to extend the mobility’s reach.

Educational attainment has an important impact on the entire life course. This study adopts the life course emphasis on personal agency to examine the relationship between individual effort and later educational attainment and the possibility that individuals get different payoffs for their personal efforts, depending on their social class. Using the 10-year follow-up of the High School and Beyond (HSB) survey, this study finds that the customary approach to educational attainment is wrong on two counts. First, we find that students' high school efforts have a significant relationship with later educational attainment, even independent of academic achievement. Second, we find that socioeconomic status (SES) affects effort, effort predicts attainment net of SES, and the benefits of effort vary by SES. These results imply that efforts matter, but even if low-SES students strive very hard, their outcomes may not be improved as much as those of other students and so they may have less incentive for s...

This chapter provides a unique contribution to the neighbourhood effects literature by demonstrating that data from in-depth interviews is capable of revealing some of the mechanisms behind unexpected quantitative findings. Such a mixed methods approach is regarded a major step forward in neighbourhood effects research. The chapter describes and attempts to explain unexpected findings from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program (mental health improvements which were not originally anticipated); a weak ‘treatment’ effect for many families (initial and subsequent moves to segregated, economically declining areas instead of higher opportunity neighbourhoods); “null” findings where large effects on individual outcomes were expected instead (MTO was primarily designed to enhance the employment prospects of adults and to improve the educational outcomes of children, but no effects on employment and education were found); and a set of conflicting findings (moves to low poverty neighbourhoods were found to be beneficial to girls, but harmful for boys). The use of mixed methods has shown how the potential of MTO-based policy approaches is limited by structural barriers, and the dynamics of poor families’ beliefs, backgrounds and constraints.

Analyzes the motives for not attending college among a nationally representative sample of high school sophomores in 2002 who had not enrolled in college by the spring of 2006.

Although youths are often confined in jobs that allow minimal gains in earnings, the AA. used quantitative data to examine whether any kinds of job contact allow youths to get jobs that lead to later higher earnings and use qualitative data to illustrate school job contacts and the ways they can help disadvantaged groups. Analyzing data from High School and Beyond, the AA. found that most types of contacts have little effect on early earnings, but relatives and school contacts place students in jobs that lead to higher earnings nine years later (at age 28). Blacks, young women, and high-achieving youths less often get their jobs from relatives but more often get jobs through school contacts. The findings indicate the theoretical importance of social contacts and previously overlooked ways that high schools improve the work-entry process for youths, especially blacks and females