Neighbourhood immigrant concentration effects on migrant and native youth’s educational commitments, an enquiry into personality differences

Neighbourhood immigrant concentration effects on migrant and native youth’s educational commitments, an enquiry into personality differences

Nieuwenhuis, J.G.
Hooimeijer, P.
Van Ham, M.
Meeus, W.

Architecture and The Built Environment

OTB

2016-03-31

In the literature examining neighbourhood effects on educational outcomes, the socialisation mechanism is usually investigated by looking at the association between neighbourhood characteristics and educational attainment. The step in between, that adolescents actually internalise educational norms held by residents, is often assumed. We attempt to fill this gap by looking at how the internalisation of educational norms (commitments) is influenced by neighbourhoods’ immigrant concentration. We investigate this process for both migrant and native youth, as both groups might be influenced differently by immigrant concentrations. To test our hypothesis we used longitudinal panel data with five waves (N = 4255), combined with between-within models which control for a large portion of potential selection bias. These models have an advantage over naïve OLS models in that they predict the effect of change in neighbourhood characteristics on change in educational commitment, and therefore offer a more dynamic approach to modelling neighbourhood effects. Our results show that living in neighbourhoods with higher proportions of immigrants increases the educational commitments of migrant youth compared to living in neighbourhoods with lower proportions. Besides, we find that adolescents with a resilient personality experience less influence of the neighbourhood context on educational commitments than do adolescents with non-resilient personalities. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 615159 (ERC Consolidator Grant DEPRIVEDHOODS, Socio-spatial inequality, deprived neighbourhoods, and neighbourhood effects) and from the Marie Curie programme under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / Career Integration Grant n.PCIG10-GA-2011-303728 (CIG Grant NBHCHOICE, Neighbourhood choice, neighbourhood sorting, and neighbourhood effects).

adolescents
educational commitment
migrant youth
neighbourhood effects
personality

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:35336648-a6c0-46c7-8088-5edb2638f4e7

SAGE

0042-0980

https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098016640693

Urban Studies, 2016

Institutional Repository

journal article

(c) 2016 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)