Neighborhood Context and the Relationship between Adolescent Family Social Capital and Later Life Outcomes

Julie Kmec, University of Pennsylvania
Mary J. Fischer, University of Pennsylvania

This paper estimates the effects of adolescent family social capital on early adulthood academic, arrest, and non-marital birth outcomes. Specifically, we assess how the aspects of neighborhoods in which families are embedded shape family social capital effects. Using longitudinal data on nearly five hundred families in urban Philadelphia neighborhoods, our models include within-family social capital measures such as parent marital stability and fiscal stability and measures of family community connections such as parent school involvement, and size of neighborhood social networks. Neighborhood types are characterized in terms of wealth, presence of adult role models, and social connectedness. We find some evidence of the effects of both levels of social capital on non-marital births, dropping out of high school, but arrests seem to be most strongly related to attendance in public school and household demographics. We also find that social capital is better transmitted into positive outcomes in high-resource neighborhoods.