Neighborhood Distress and School Dropout: The Variable Significance of Community Context

Kyle D. Crowder, Western Washington University
Scott J. South, State University of New York at Albany

Drawing on theories of collective socialization, social capital, and social control, we develop hypotheses regarding the conditional nature of neighborhood effects on the risk of dropping out of school, and then test these hypotheses with event history models based on data from the 1968-1993 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that, among African Americans, the detrimental impact of neighborhood distress has increased significantly over time, a probable repercussion of the increasing geographic concentration of poverty. The negative effect of neighborhood distress on school completion is particularly pronounced among black adolescents from single-parent families and among white adolescents from low-income families, results broadly consistent with Wilson's claim that exposure to neighborhood poverty reinforces the damaging consequences of individual disadvantage. Among whites, the deleterious impact of neighborhood distress on school dropout is stronger for young women than for young men and for recent in-movers than for long-term residents.