Neighborhood Effects Analysis

Neighborhood effects analysis estimates how much the place a person lives — its poverty, social cohesion, disorder, or institutions — shapes individual outcomes such as health, crime, educational attainment, and economic mobility, over and above the individual's own characteristics. It is dominated by multilevel (hierarchical) models that recognise people are nested within neighbourhoods, separating variation that lies between places from variation within them. The central methodological challenge, crystallised in Robert Sampson and colleagues' influential 2002 review, is distinguishing genuine contextual effects from selection bias: the fact that people do not sort into neighbourhoods at random.