Protection from risk: An Exploration of when and how neighborhood-level factors can reduce violent youth outcomes

This research explores the ability of neighborhood-level factors to serve as either promotive or protective factors to reduce the risk of violent outcomes among adolescents. Unique contributions of this research include a novel definition of neighborhood constructed through a housing market study, the aggregation of individual-level survey responses to the newly defined neighborhoods, and the application ofhierarchical linear modeling to explore cross-level interaction (e.g., protective) effects. Using data from Waves 1-9 of the Rochester Youth Development Study, our analyses find little support for promotive effects at the neighborhood level. However, several of our constructs are revealed to provide protective effects across various domains of risk. In specific, we find that high-risk youths whose parents report high levels of social integration and neighborhood integration are less likely to experience violent outcomes than similar youth whose parents do not report high levels of integration. These findings were particularly strong in the domains of school and peer risk which may inherently reflect the "social" quality of risk in these realms.