Hi all,
We hope that you can join us for the Applied Statistics Workshop this
Wednesday, October 27th when we will be happy to have Corina Graif, a
PhD candidate in the Sociology department giving a practice job talk
entitled "The Spatial Embeddedness of Neighborhood Effects: Toward a
Spatial Understanding of Mental Health and Obesity in the Context of
Moving to Opportunity." You will find an abstract below. As always, we
will serve a light lunch (Thai) and the talk will begin around 12:15p.
"The Spatial Embeddedness of Neighborhood Effects: Toward a Spatial
Understanding of Mental Health and Obesity in the Context of Moving to
Opportunity"
Corina Graif
Department of Sociology
CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.)
Wednesday, October 27th, 12 noon
Abstract:
This chapter makes the case that locational attainment and
neighborhood effects cannot be fully understood outside the larger
spatial context within which neighborhoods are embedded. The
importance of neighborhood poverty in stifling residents’ physical and
mental wellbeing has long been recognized by social scientists and
policy makers. While heated debates across the disciplines reignite
periodically about the adequate measurement of neighborhoods, this
paper breaks away from the aggregation-level dilemma to consider
alternative understandings of place and space. Analyses are based on
longitudinal data on over 4000 low-income families who participated in
the Moving to Opportunity Experiment in five major U.S. cities. The
findings support the hypothesis that the spatial context of
neighborhoods matters for mental health and obesity. Moreover, they
indicate that the environmental factors affecting obesity tend to be
more spatially localized while those affecting mental health tend to
be spatially expansive. The spatial framework for thinking about
neighborhood effects proposed here allows for a more nuanced
integration with the differential spatial distributions of resources
and disadvantage within and across cities and bears critical
implications for reorienting the discussions of locational attainment
and neighborhood effects toward a more continuous consideration of the
role of space and its interaction with place.
Cheers,
matt.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew Blackwell
PhD Candidate
Institute for Quantitative Social Science
Department of Government
Harvard University
url:
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~blackwel/