Neighbourhood histories and educational attainment

Neighbourhood histories and educational attainment: The role of accumulation, duration, timing and sequencing of exposure to poverty

Troost, A.A. (TU Delft Urban Studies)
Janssen, H.J. (TU Delft Urban Studies)
van Ham, M. (TU Delft Urbanism)

Urbanism

2022

Studies of neighbourhood effects increasingly research the neighbourhood histories of individuals. It is difficult to compare the outcomes of these studies as they all use different datasets, conceptualisations and operationalisations of neighbourhood characteristics and outcome variables. This paper contributes to the literature by studying educational attainment and comparing the effects of the timing, accumulation, duration and sequencing of exposure to neighbourhood poverty. We use longitudinal register data to study the population of children born in the Netherlands in 1995 and follow them until the age of 23. Our findings show that it is important to separate the early adult years (age 18–22) when constructing individual histories of exposure to neighbourhood poverty. We find that the effect of exposure to neighbourhood deprivation on educational attainment during adolescence is slightly stronger than the effect of exposure during childhood. We conclude that the observed relationship between neighbourhood poverty and educational attainment depends on how exposure to the neighbourhood effect is conceptualised and measured; choosing just one dimension could lead to under- or overestimation of the importance of exposure to neighbourhood poverty.

education
inequality
neighbourhood
neighbourhood histories
poverty/exclusion

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f06a04ed-1422-4c6f-96d9-0793f59c0343

https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221112351

0042-0980

Urban Studies: an international journal for research in urban studies, 60 (4), 655-672

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 A.A. Troost, H.J. Janssen, M. van Ham