Schools, Neighborhoods, and Adolescent Mental Health

Albert Einstein Col Of Med Yeshiva Univ, Bronx NY

Investigators

Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose is to examine the relationship between school characteristics and adolescent mental health. Hypotheses were derived using theories linking neighborhood traits to mental health developed by Jencks and Mayer (1990). Using this framework, it is postulated that schools influence adolescent mental health through their institutional resources (i.e., academic resources, financial resources, infrastructure) and peer effects (i.e., delinquency, absenteeism, dropout rate). The study aims are: 1) to test whether there is a direct relationship between these school attributes and adolescent mental health; 2) to test whether these school attributes mediate the relationship between neighborhood traits and adolescent mental health; and 3) to test whether attributes of an adolescent moderate the relationship of school and neighborhood traits to mental health. Because variance can be attributed to school effects that are instead due to the self-selection of certain kinds of students into certain kinds of schools, the analyses will measure and correct for this potential bias. The data that will be used to test these hypotheses was collected for R01MH61144. It consist of 1,052 adolescents age 14 to 17 living in the Bronx, NY. The data include measures of adolescent psychological disturbance, the school the adolescent attends and the address where they live. These data will be linked to publicly available data on schools and census tracts. Information on the socio-demographic characteristics of census tracts is available from the website, Infoshare Online. Information on school characteristics is available from the NYC Department of Education website and other websites. This study will advance mental health research by describing the relationship between school and neighborhood traits and adolescent mental health, using theoretical approaches that draw directly from neighborhood theories. It will also demonstrate a method for adjusting for the self-selection of adolescents into schools; most studies of school and neighborhood effects cannot correct for the resulting selection bias. [unreadable] [unreadable]