Having a strong community protects
poor adolescents from risky health behaviors
Children who grow up in poverty have health problems
as adults. But a new study finds that poor adolescents who live in communities
with more social cohesiveness and control get some measure of protection; they're
less likely to smoke and be obese as adolescents.
The new study, published in Psychological Science, a
journal of the Association for Psychological Science, is part of a long-term examination
of children growing up poor in rural upstate New York. The study was designed
to discover, "What is it about poverty that leads to these negative outcomes?"
says lead author Gary W. Evans, of Cornell University. He recruited the participants
in the late 1990s, when they were 8 to 10 years old. About half grew up poor and
the rest are from middle-income families. Evans and colleagues check in on them
periodically to measure their health and exposure to risk factors, and the researchers
are continuing to follow them.
For this analysis, Evans worked with Rachel Kutcher,
then a Cornell honors undergraduate, who was interested in studying how community
affects health. When the people in the study were about 17 years old, the subjects
and their mothers filled out surveys about social capital, a measure of how connected
a community is and how much social control there is. For example, the mothers
decided how much they agreed that "One of my neighbors would do something if they
saw someone trying to sell drugs to a child or youth in plain sight," and the
adolescents indicated whether they had adults from whom they could ask for advice.
The adolescents also completed surveys on behavior, including smoking, and had
their height and weight measured.
As expected, adolescents from impoverished families were
more likely to smoke and to have a higher body mass index (BMI), a measure of
obesity, than adolescents from middle-income families. But poor adolescents who
had more social capital were somewhat protected; they were less likely to smoke
and tended to have lower BMIs than poor adolescents who didn't have abundant social
capital. "You may be able to loosen those connections between early childhood
poverty and negative health outcomes if you live in a community with good social
resources," Evans says.
Adolescents in communities with more social capital may
have better role models or mentors. Or perhaps in a more empowered community,
where people feel comfortable stopping someone else's bad behavior, the young
people also feel less helpless as individuals. They might believe that "you have
some control over what's going to happen to you," Evans says.
It's an easy conclusion that increasing social capital
might improve the lives of children in poverty. But Evans emphasizes that this
won't solve the health problems associated with impoverished living in childhood.
Poor adolescents who live in communities with more social capital may be better
off than other poor kids, but they're still less healthy than their middle-income
peers. "It's not correct to conclude that, if you just improve social capital,
then it would be ok to be poor," Evans says. "Poverty is important."
This work was funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation and
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Network on Socioeconomics Status
and Health.
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