title: Being Poorer Than the Rest of the Neighborhood: Relative Deprivation and Problem Behavior of Youth.
abstract: According to the neighborhood effects hypothesis, there is a negative relation between neighborhood wealth and youth's problem behavior. It is often assumed that there are more problems in deprived neighborhoods, but there are also reports of higher rates of behavioral problems in more affluent neighborhoods. Much of this literature does not take into account relative wealth. Our central question was whether the economic position of adolescents' families, relative to the neighborhood in which they lived, was related to adolescents' internalizing and externalizing problem behavior. We used longitudinal data for youth between 12-16 and 16-20 years of age, combined with population register data (N = 926; 55% females). We employ between-within models to account for time-invariant confounders, including parental background characteristics. Our findings show that, for adolescents, moving to a more affluent neighborhood was related to increased levels of depression, social phobia, aggression, and conflict with fathers and mothers. This could be indirect evidence for the relative deprivation mechanism, but we could not confirm this, and we did not find any gender differences. The results do suggest that future research should further investigate the role of individuals' relative position in their neighborhood in order not to overgeneralize neighborhood effects and to find out for whom neighborhoods matter.
authors.affiliation: OTB - Research for the Built Environment, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, P.O. box 5043, 2600GA, Delft, The Netherlands. j.g.nieuwenhuis@tudelft.nl.
authors.forename: Jaap
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Nieuwenhuis
authors.affiliation: OTB - Research for the Built Environment, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, P.O. box 5043, 2600GA, Delft, The Netherlands.|School of Geography & Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK.
authors.forename: Maarten
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: van Ham
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
authors.forename: Rongqin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Research Centre Adolescent Development, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Branje
authors.affiliation: Research Centre Adolescent Development, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.|Department of Developmental Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Wim
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Meeus
authors.affiliation: Urban and Regional Research Centre Utrecht (URU), Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Pieter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hooimeijer
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000374:Aggression / Q000523:psychology*; D003863:Depression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011204:Poverty Areas; D000066553:Problem Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D012925:Social Conformity; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Externalizing problems; Internalizing problems; Neighborhood effects; Parent–adolescent conflict; Relative deprivation; Residential mobility