David S. Kirk and Thomas Gannon-Rowley
Contextual Effects on Students’ Safety:
Modeling Differential Effects of Neighborhood and School Social Organization
Across the social sciences, researchers study adolescents to understand developmental
processes and outcomes associated with negotiating the transition from dependence to autonomy.
Increasingly, studies of adolescents focus on their relationships with parents, neighbors, teachers, and
peers in the contexts of the home, school, the neighborhood, and the community. Often, researchers
restrict their analysis to one specific context and use a multitude of variables to examine the
relationship between, for example, family structure or parent-child interactions and some child or
adolescent outcome. Such an analysis is appropriate for certain outcomes, especially for children at
younger ages. As children age into adolescence, however, the challenge of modeling contextual
influences grows. Beyond the influence of the family, researchers must account for the school and
neighborhood contexts as sources of influence on children’s socialization. This paper attempts to
focus on the impact of school and neighborhood contexts on adolescents. For this analysis, we
restrict our focus to the outcome of feelings of safety, an outcome hypothesized to be affected by the
structural and social characteristics of neighborhoods and schools.
Theoretical Background
Interdisciplinary research projects dominate a growing body of literature on context effects,
also studied as concentration effects (Wilson 1987) or neighborhood effects (Mayer and Jencks 1989;
Jencks and Mayer 1990). These collaborations and resultant works utilize Bronfenbrenner’s
influential work on contexts or systems affecting development (1979; 1989). Given traditional
disciplinary foci, however, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that researchers continue to examine
effects and outcomes based on individual contexts. This occurs to the neglect of complex inter-
relationships or interactions across multiple ones. Some researchers are attempting to narrow the gap
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Convention