Am J Community Psychol DOI 10.1007/s10464-006-9084-x
ORIGINAL PAPER
The Impact of the Built Environment on Children’s School Conduct Grades: The Role of Diversity of Use in a Hispanic Neighborhood Jos´e Szapocznik · Joanna Lombard · Frank Martinez · Craig A. Mason · Deborah Gorman-Smith · Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk · Scott C. Brown · Arnold Spokane
C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006
Abstract A population-based study examined the relationship between diversity of use of the built environment and teacher reports of children’s grades. Diversity of use of the built environment (i.e., proportion of a block that is residential, institutional, commercial and vacant) was assessed for all 403 city blocks in East Little Havana, Miami—a Hispanic neighborhood. Cluster analysis identified three block-types, based on diversity of use: Residential, Mixed-Use, and Commercial. Cross-classified hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the impact of diversity of use, school, gender, and year-in-school on academic and conduct grades for 2857 public school children who lived in these blocks. Contrary to popular belief, mixed-use blocks were associated with optimal outcomes. Specifically, follow-up analyses found that a youth living on a residential block had a 74% greater odds of being in the lowest 10% J. Szapocznik () · J. Lombard · F. Martinez · S. C. Brown Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Center for Family Studies, 1425 NW 10th Ave., Room 207, Miami, Florida 33136, USA e-mail:
[email protected] J. Szapocznik · J. Lombard · F. Martinez · E. Plater-Zyberk University of Miami School of Architecture, Coral Gables, Florida, USA C. A. Mason University of Maine College of Education and Human Development, Orono, Maine, USA D. Gorman-Smith University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois, USA A. Spokane Lehigh University College of Education, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
of conduct grades (conduct GPA .10) or the Commercial coefficients (γ = − 0.062, t(1346) = 1.005, p > .10) were significant. Academic grades An identical series of analyses was performed predicting academic grades. No significant effects were found for the diversity of use variables. Post hoc epidemiological analyses A final series of post hoc analyses were performed to examine the relationship between block diversity and conduct grades from an epidemiological perspective. These analyses examined differences in the proportion of extreme cases between Mixed-Use and Residential blocks, and the
Fig. 2 Youth conduct grades, by built-environment use block-type and gender
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Am J Community Psychol
impact of block diversity on population rates of conduct problems. While the differences in mean conduct grades based on block diversity were modest, a small difference in group means can result in a much larger difference in the proportion of cases in the tails of their distributions (Scott, Mason, & Chapman, 1999). Therefore, an additional analysis examined the degree to which the lower conduct grades observed among youth living on Residential blocks translated to an increase in the proportion of youth with relatively high levels of conduct problems (defined as conduct grades below the 10th percentile). This was tested by applying a Bernoulli model to the cross-classified hierarchical linear analysis, in which conduct grades were dichotomized at the 10th percentile (conduct GPA = 2.17), with “1” indicating a conduct grade below the 10th percentile, and a “0” indicating a conduct grade above or equal to the 10th percentile. For this analysis, Mixed-Use block served as the referent group, and two dummy coded variables corresponding to Residential block and Commercial block were used. Gender was grand mean centered and included as a level 1 predictor. The block type variables were not significant predictors of gender at level 2; however, Residential block was a significant predictor of the level 1 intercept (γ = 0.55, t(2852) = 2.158, p = .031). This corresponded to an odds-ratio of 1.74, indicating that the odds that a child living on a Residential block was identified as having conduct problems (defined as a conduct GPA
