Papers by Jaap Nieuwenhuis
Cities, 2023
An extensive body of research has documented the deleterious effects of community violence on ado... more An extensive body of research has documented the deleterious effects of community violence on adolescent development and behavior. Much of this research focuses on how exposure to violence structures social interaction, and, ultimately, how it motivates youth to engage in troublesome behavior. This study builds upon this body of research to demonstrate how exposure to community violence strains relationships between adolescents and their caregivers, resulting in higher levels of interpersonal conflict. Drawing on five waves of longitudinal panel data (n = 778; observations = 3458; 55 % female), combined with police records of violent crime in Utrecht, the Netherlands, a hybrid tobit regression documents how exposure to local and nearby violence affects child-parent conflict. The results indicate that youth who experience high levels of neighborhood violence report higher levels of conflict with parents than youth with low exposure to neighborhood violence. These results are consistent across different levels of neighborhood aggregation.
The Information Society, 2023
What kinds of titles are appropriate for research articles? Does creativity have a place in title... more What kinds of titles are appropriate for research articles? Does creativity have a place in titles or should titles be descriptive and scientific? This article examines the 408 articles titled "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" and asks why there are so many articles with the same title. The academic culture of publication pressure can lead to researchers choosing creative titles, including popular song titles, to stand out from the crowd. Furthermore, risk assessment leads researchers to choose the same songs as others, because well-known, easy-tounderstand cultural references are better rewarded than more obscure references. The collective outcome of this, many researchers choosing the same title for their articles, reflects the mass production of cultural products, wherein creativity is standardized and panders to the largest possible audience.
Urban Studies, 2022
This article explores the effect of meeting opportunities between local urban and nonlocal reside... more This article explores the effect of meeting opportunities between local urban and nonlocal residents on locals' prejudice against migrant children in China by focusing on three contexts: friendships, schools and neighbourhoods. China's hukou policy creates a boundary between urban and rural residents, which also takes the form of locals and nonlocals in rural-to-urban migration. Urban public schools with a mix of local and migrant students offer a chance to observe the intergroup relationships between local and nonlocal students as well as their parents. Using two waves of data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this study examines how changes in migrant friend groups, schoolmates and neighbours of local children affect changes in their parents' prejudice, as seen among a sample of 1630 student-parent pairs. With longitudinal data, this study mitigates the effect of reverse causality between intergroup contact and prejudice. The findings show that parents whose children have more migrant friends have less prejudice, under certain conditions. Additionally, more nonlocal students in a school relates to less prejudice, especially among parents who are more embedded in the school life. Furthermore, local families with low socioeconomic status experience an increase in prejudice, potentially due to an increased feeling of threat. Additionally, this article finds that prejudiced attitudes spread through the social networks of children and parents at the school level. This study emphasises the importance of different contexts of meeting opportunities and sheds new light on the generalisability of the (extended) contact hypothesis to the understudied context of Chinese internal migration.
Asian Journal of Social Science, 2022
Neighborhood and community effects studies have informed urban policies in the West since three d... more Neighborhood and community effects studies have informed urban policies in the West since three decades. Since about ten years, this research line is seen increasingly in East and Southeast Asia as well. As an emerging field, the literature has yet to be critically reviewed and its body of literature provides a unique opportunity to study the effects that different research communities might have on its development. This systematic review collects 165 studies and gives a critical appraisal of this literature, specifically focusing on publication bias. Findings show that "true " neighborhood effects might be overestimated. Health research shows greater publication bias than human geography and general social science. Studies by only local scholars are more prone to bias than studies from collaborative teams or only nonlocal scholars, suggesting that this field is relatively early in its life-cycle or that publication pressure is much higher in Asia compared to the West.
Social Science Quarterly, 2022
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2021
Scholars generally agree that financial deprivation negatively affects students' educational outc... more Scholars generally agree that financial deprivation negatively affects students' educational outcomes. However, while absolute levels of resources are important, individuals' perceived relative economic wellbeing also shape their educational outcomes. This article asks whether attending school with peers from comparably richer families is related to adolescents' educational expectations, aspirations, university plans, and university attainment. We test the relative deprivation theory by comparing three different forms of the Yitzhaki Index. Data for this study comes from the Taiwan Youth Project, which consists of two cohorts of adolescents (N = 5098) from 162 middle school classrooms. The results show that relative deprivation in the classroom is negatively related to students' educational expectations, aspirations, and plans to attend university. Yet, relatively deprivation is not associated with higher educational attainment when controlling for absolute measures of family background. These results highlight the need for a more nuanced understanding of perceived relative economic disadvantages in shaping student outcomes.
Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 2021
We studied the relation between cumulative exposure to neighbourhood deprivation and adolescents'... more We studied the relation between cumulative exposure to neighbourhood deprivation and adolescents' Big Five personality traits, and the moderating role of personality in the relation between neighbourhood deprivation and the development of problem behaviour and educational attainment. We studied 5365 British adolescents from ages 10 to 16, with neighbourhood information from birth onwards. Extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness to experience moderated the relation between deprivation and problem behaviour. For educational attainment, only extraversion was a moderator. This means that higher values on personality traits were related to weaker relations between neighbourhood deprivation and problem behaviour and educational attainment. The results showed the importance of taking into account adolescents' personality when assessing developmental outcomes in relation to neighbourhood deprivation.
Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 2021
Because the demographic composition of neighborhoods and schools overlaps, their effects on educa... more Because the demographic composition of neighborhoods and schools overlaps, their effects on educational attainment are not independent of each other. Throughout the early teenage years, the timing and duration of exposure to neighborhood and school contexts can vary, advocating for a longitudinal approach when studying schooling outcomes. This study uses Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children data (N = 4502; 49% female) to examine how exposure to poverty between ages 10-16 predicts educational attainment. The results indicate that enduring exposure to neighborhood poverty relates to educational attainment, while timing does not. For school poverty, longer exposure is related to lower attainment, but earlier exposure has a stronger impact than later exposure. Adolescents who were exposed to poverty in both contexts for the full observation period had the lowest educational attainment. The findings highlight the importance of understanding when and how long adolescents are exposed to contextual poverty.
Social Inclusion, 2021
Socio-spatial inequality and school inequality are strongly related. Where people live affects th... more Socio-spatial inequality and school inequality are strongly related. Where people live affects the opportunities individuals have in life, such as the opportunity to send your children to a good school. The level of urbanisation is related to the number of options people have to choose good schools, so more urbanised areas likely offer more options for good schools. However, the families that can choose good schools are likely families with high income or education levels. Data for this study come from two waves of the Taiwan Youth Project (N = 2,893), which consists of two cohorts of students from 162 classrooms in 40 junior high schools in northern Taiwan. When school quality is proxied by socioeconomic status (SES), the results show that, in general, students from the most urbanised areas, wealthier parents, and higher-educated parents, are more likely to go to higher SES schools. However, the strongest effects are for higher income and higher-educated parents in the most urbanised areas. This suggests that in the most urbanised areas, families have the most options regarding school choice, and richer and more educated families are better able to circumvent school catchment areas, either because they can afford an address in a better catchment area or because they understand the importance of school choice.
Social Science & Medicine, 2020
Neighborhood social capital is argued to influence individual health. However, many studies do no... more Neighborhood social capital is argued to influence individual health. However, many studies do not make the distinction between individual level and group level social capital. Furthermore, many studies on this topic are cross-sectional studies based in Western countries. In this study I will examine health and neighborhood social capital by measuring social capital on both the individual and the aggregated neighborhood level. Data from two waves of the Taiwan Youth Project give a longitudinal perspective into the development of health of adolescents from northern Taiwan. The data consist of 2,225 adolescents, with measures at age 14 and 15. The adolescents are clustered within 39 neighborhoods. The results show that adolescents’ individual level neighborhood social capital is related to their baseline health status, but not to changes in health status. Only neighborhood level social capital is related to the changes in health status. More social capital in the neighborhood is related to positive changes in health status. To test whether the effect of neighborhood social capital changes, depending on how important the neighborhood context is in someone's life, I studied differential effects for adolescents with more or less alternative contacts outside of the neighborhood and the years adolescents resided in the neighborhood. The original results were not affected by these factors, suggesting that the relation between neighborhood social capital and health is pervasive, despite individuals’ integration in the neighborhood.
European Sociological Review, 2019
Existing empirical research on the link between ethnic minority concentration in residential envi... more Existing empirical research on the link between ethnic minority concentration in residential environments and voting for the radical right is inconclusive, mainly due to major differences between studies in the spatial scale at which minority concentration is measured. We examined whether the presence of non-western ethnic minorities in the residential environment, measured at four spatial scales, is related to individuals' intention to vote for the Dutch Party for Freedom (Dutch acronym PVV). We combined individual level survey data and register data, and we used multi-level structural equation models to examine possible mediation by anti-immigrant attitudes and political dissatisfaction. The models show different effects at different scales. At the micro scale (100 by 100 meter grids) we find a curvilinear effect: individuals with 30-50 per cent non-western minorities in their direct living environment are most likely to report to vote for the PVV. At higher spatial scales (up to municipal level) we find that the higher the proportion of non-western minorities, the more likely individuals are to report to vote for the PVV. These effects can however not be explained by anti-immigrant attitudes or political dissatisfaction. We even find that at the micro scale the presence of non-western minorities is related to less anti-immigrant attitudes.
Urban Studies, 2019
The neighbourhood in which people live reflects their social class and preferences, so studying s... more The neighbourhood in which people live reflects their social class and preferences, so studying socio-spatial mobility between neighbourhood types gives insight into the openness of spatial class structures of societies and into the ability of people to leave disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In this paper we study the extent to which people move between different types of neighbourhoods by socio-economic status in different inequality and segregation contexts in four European countries: Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK (England and Wales), and Estonia. The study is based on population registers and census data for the 2001–2011 period. For England and Wales, which has long had high levels of income inequalities and high levels of socio-economic segregation, we find that levels of mobility between neighbourhood types are low and opportunities to move to more socio-economically advantaged neighbourhoods are modest. In Estonia, which used to be one of the most equal and least segregated countries in Europe, and now is one of the most unequal countries, we find high levels of mobility, but these reproduce segregation patterns and it is difficult to move to less deprived neighbourhoods for those in the most deprived neighbourhoods. In the Netherlands and Sweden, where income inequalities are the smallest, it is the easiest to move from the most deprived to less deprived neighbourhoods. The conclusion is that the combination of high levels of income inequalities and high levels of spatial segregation tend to lead to a vicious circle of segregation for low-income groups, where it is difficult to undertake upward socio-spatial mobility.
Data in Brief, 2018
It is well-known that the spatial scale at which neighborhoods are operationalized can affect the... more It is well-known that the spatial scale at which neighborhoods are operationalized can affect the outcomes we observe. This article describes a typology of children's neighborhood income trajectories generated by sequence analysis using 100 Â 100 m grids to define neighborhoods. The article further describes ethnic differences in the prevalence of the different types of neighborhood trajectories, focusing on the children of the four largest non-Western immigrant groups in the Netherlands (Turks, Moroccans, Surinamese, Antilleans) and native Dutch children. The data can be compared to the research article " Ethnic differences in timing and duration of exposure to neighborhood disadvantage during childhood " (Kleinepier et al., 2018).
This paper examines ethnic differences in childhood neighborhood disadvantage among children livi... more This paper examines ethnic differences in childhood neighborhood disadvantage among children living in the Netherlands. In contrast to more conventional approaches for assessing children's exposure to neighborhood poverty (e.g., point-in-time and cumulative measures of exposure), we apply sequence analysis to simultaneously capture the timing and duration of exposure to poor neighborhoods during childhood. Rich administrative microdata offered a unique opportunity to follow the entire 1999 birth cohort of the Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, and Antillean second generation and a native Dutch comparison group from birth up until age 15 (N = 24,212). Results indicate that especially Turkish and Moroccan children had higher odds than native Dutch children to live in a poor neighborhood at any specific stage during childhood, but particularly throughout the entirety of childhood. Although ethnic differences in neighborhood income trajectories became smaller after adjusting for parental and household characteristics, a substantial proportion of the differences remained unexplained. In addition, the impact of household income on children's neighborhood income trajectories was found to be weaker for ethnic minority children than for native Dutch children. We discuss our findings in relation to theories on spatial assimilation, place stratification, and residential preferences.
Personality and Individual Differences, 2018
This study examined the relation between school poverty and educational attainment of adolescents... more This study examined the relation between school poverty and educational attainment of adolescents, and tested whether personality trait agreeableness moderated this link. The sample consisted of 4236 adolescents, whose math abilities were assessed twice, at ages around 13/14 and 15/16. Agreeableness was assessed at age 13. School poverty was measured as the proportion of children eligible for free school meals in the school. The results showed a negative relation between school poverty and educational attainment, however, this negative relation was weaker for adolescents with higher levels of agreeableness. Specifically, in low poverty schools, agreeableness did not predict differences in educational attainment. The results were in line with the diathesis-stress model. This suggests that higher levels of agreeableness can contribute to resilience and better coping with contextual stressors in the school environment.
According to the neighborhood effects hypothesis , there is a negative relation between neighborh... more According to the neighborhood effects hypothesis , there is a negative relation between neighborhood wealth and youth's problem behavior. It is often assumed that there are more problems in deprived neighborhoods, but there are also reports of higher rates of behavioral problems in more affluent neighborhoods. Much of this literature does not take into account relative wealth. Our central question was whether the economic position of adolescents' families, relative to the neighborhood in which they lived, was related to adolescents' internalizing and externalizing problem behavior. We used longitudinal data for youth between 12–16 and 16–20 years of age, combined with population register data (N = 926; 55% females). We employ between-within models to account for time-invariant confounders, including parental background characteristics. Our findings show that, for adolescents, moving to a more affluent neighborhood was related to increased levels of depression, social phobia, aggression, and conflict with fathers and mothers. This could be indirect evidence for the relative deprivation mechanism, but we could not confirm this, and we did not find any gender differences. The results do suggest that future research should further investigate the role of individuals' relative position in their neighborhood in order not to over-generalize neighborhood effects and to find out for whom neighborhoods matter.
We studied how personality moderates the effect of neighbourhood disadvantage on work commitment ... more We studied how personality moderates the effect of neighbourhood disadvantage on work commitment and unemployment in early adulthood. Using a personality typology of resili-ents, overcontrollers, and undercontrollers, we hypothesised that the association between neighbourhood poverty and both work commitment and unemployment would be stronger for overcontrollers and undercontrollers than for resilients. We used longitudinal data (N = 249) to test whether the length of exposure to neighbourhood poverty between age 16 and 21 predicts work commitment and unemployment at age 25. In line with our hypothesis, the findings showed that longer exposure was related to weaker work commitment among undercontrollers and overcontrollers and to higher unemployment among undercontrollers. Resilients' work commitment and unemployment were not predicted by neighbourhood poverty.
This four-year longitudinal study attempted to test person-environment interaction theory and bio... more This four-year longitudinal study attempted to test person-environment interaction theory and biological sensitivity theory by assessing whether individuals’ biological stress activity CARAUCg (Cortisol Awakening Response Area Under the Curve with respect to ground) moderates the effects of neighbourhood density on the development of adolescent externalizing problem behaviours. Participants were 358 Dutch adolescents with a mean age of 15 years at the first measurement. Our analyses showed that CARAUCg moderated the effects of neighbourhood density on the level of parent-reported delinquency and aggression and adolescent self-reported delinquency. More specifically, for adolescents with high CARAUCg, higher neighbourhood density significantly predicted higher levels of parent-reported and adolescent self-reported delinquency and aggression, whereas the association was reversed or non-significant for adolescents with low CARAUCg. Our findings suggest that adolescents with different levels of CARAUCg respond differentially to the density of the neighbourhood they live in, supporting for person-environment interaction perspectives and biological sensitivity theory.
In the literature examining neighbourhood effects on educational outcomes, the socialisation mech... more In the literature examining neighbourhood effects on educational outcomes, the socialisation mechanism is usually investigated by looking at the association between neighbourhood characteristics and educational attainment. The step in between, that adolescents actually internalise educational norms held by residents, is often assumed. We attempt to fill this gap by looking at how the internalisation of educational norms (commitments) is influenced by neighbourhoods’ immigrant concentration. We investigate this process for both migrant and native youth, as both groups might be influenced differently by immigrant concentrations. To test our hypothesis we used longitudinal panel data with five waves (N=4,255), combined with between-within models which control for a large portion of potential selection bias. These models have an advantage over naïve OLS models in that they predict the effect of change in neighbourhood characteristics on change in educational commitment, and therefore offer a more dynamic approach to modelling neighbourhood effects. Our results show that living in neighbourhoods with higher proportions of immigrants increases the educational commitments of migrant youth compared to living in neighbourhoods with lower proportions. Besides, we find that adolescents with a resilient personality experience less influence of the neighbourhood context on educational commitments than do adolescents with non-resilient personalities.
Publication bias in the neighbourhood effects literature, Mar 2016
There is a strong belief amongst policy makers for the existence of neighbourhood effects, i.e., ... more There is a strong belief amongst policy makers for the existence of neighbourhood effects, i.e., that above and beyond other influence, individuals' life chances are influenced by the neighbourhood in which they live. The evidence from scientific reviews leans towards the idea that it is likely that neighbourhoods indeed affect life chances of their residents. Yet, amongst scientists there is no consensus about the neighbourhood effects hypothesis, due to differences in methodological and theoretical approaches. I asks why, when there is no consensus, the evidence leans towards supporting the neighbourhood effects hypothesis. To test whether the scientific evidence for the neighbourhood effects hypothesis is driven by publication bias, I employ a meta-analysis over all studies that test for a relation between neighbourhood characteristics and educational outcomes. The results show that around the arbitrary boundary for statistical significance (p-value is less than 0.05), there is a unlikely large share of studies that are just significant compared to the share of studies that are just insignificant. This finding strongly suggests that there is publication bias in the neighbourhood effects literature.
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Papers by Jaap Nieuwenhuis
Chapter 2: The association between neighbourhoods and educational achievement, a systematic review and meta-analysis
Chapter 3: Neighbourhood effects on school achievement: the mediating effect of parenting and problematic behaviour?
Chapter 4: Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment of adolescents, buffered by personality and educational commitment
Chapter 5: Neighbourhood effects on migrant and native youth’s educational commitments, an enquiry into personality differences
Chapter 6: Neighbourhood poverty, work commitment and unemployment in early adulthood: the moderating effect of personality
Chapter 7: Conclusion
Samenvatting
The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how neighbourhood effects on social mobility might be affected by parenting, problem behaviour, personality, and educational commitments. This aim came about when we considered the great variety in research findings from the neighbourhood effects literature, ranging from weak to strong neighbourhood effects, as well as insignificant effects and effects with reversed signs. We set out to study four factors that might mediate or moderate the neighbourhood effect on socio-economic outcomes. We look at the mediating role of parenting strategies and adolescent problem behaviour, and at the moderating role of personality and educational commitments. We expect the effect of the neighbourhood to differ between individuals who score differently on these four characteristics. We studied whether the neighbourhood effect on educational attainment is mediated by parenting strategies, as well as by adolescent problem behaviour. We investigated two neighbourhood characteristics: the proportion of immigrant groups and the mean property value in the neighbourhood. However, both are not mediated by parenting strategies and problem behaviour. We did find that parents are likely to adapt their parenting behaviours to the demographic composition of the neighbourhood.For example, parents in neighbourhoods with higher ethnic heterogeneity apply more protective parenting strategies. However, we did not find that the changes in parenting behaviour change the neighbourhood effect. Furthermore, we hypothesised that educational commitments might moderate the negative influence of neighbourhood disadvantage. This was supported by our analyses. We find that adolescents with the highest level of educational commitments are not or hardly affected, while adolescents with the lowest level experience a strong negative influence of neighbourhood disadvantage. Also, we hypothesised that adolescents with a resilient personality experience a weaker neighbourhood effect than overcontrollers and undercontrollers, because resilients are better able to cope with neighbourhood adversity. We found four things. First, our analyses indicate that the group of resilient adolescents experiences no influence at all of neighbourhood disadvantage on educational attainment, while overcontrollers and undercontrollers do. Second, for migrant youth, we find that living in neighbourhoods with moderate proportions of immigrants increases the educational commitments compared to living in neighbourhoods with lower proportions. We find, however, that migrant youth with a resilient personality experience less positive influence of the neighbourhood context than do adolescents with other personalities. Third, we find that the work commitments of resilients are hardly affected by neighbourhood adversity, while those of overcontrollers and undercontrollers are affected. And fourth, we find that only for overcontrollers, the chance of becoming unemployed is affected by neighbourhood adversity. To summarise, from our analyses it is likely that part of the heterogeneity in findings of neighbourhood effects studies can be explained by commonly unobserved characteristics. The most promising characteristics are educational commitments and personality types. Both seem to function as a powerful moderator between the relation between neighbourhood characteristics and individual socio-economic outcomes.