Neighborhood Definitions and the Spatial Dimension of Daily Life in Los Angeles

Anne Pebley, University of California at Los Angeles
Narayan Sastry, RAND

In recent years, the effects of neighborhood characteristics on children's well-being has become a topic of considerable debate. A key unresolved research question concerns the appropriate definition of neighborhood. In this paper, we investigate how adults and children define their own neighborhoods and how salient these neighborhoods are to daily life. We draw on data from a major new longitudinal study, the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, which we have specifically designed to test hypotheses about neighborhood effects on children. Previous studies have defined neighborhoods as census tracts or zip codes, but have rarely been able to investigate how these definitions are related to the respondents' perceptions of neighborhood boundaries or to the geography of parents' and children's daily lives. The findings from this paper offer useful insights to researchers deciding among alternative neighborhood definitions for surveys or analyses.