Neighborhood, Place, and the Life Course

Abstract

We consider the rapidly expanding literature on features of the neighborhoods and other places individuals encounter in their everyday lives and their relevance to life course approaches. Recent decades have seen a dramatic increase in research examining “neighborhood effects” – particularly in urban settings – with increasing evidence that neighborhood social environments independently contribute to life course outcomes. Despite the promise of research on neighborhood and other place effects, the field faces a number of significant challenges, most notably, the need for more sophisticated theoretical and analytic treatment of multilevel influence processes, including the mechanisms through which sociospatial contexts are channeled and the individual level exposure and response processes that link environments to outcomes. We also consider questions concerning the appropriate unit of analysis, selection and causal inference in estimating neighborhood effects, the adequacy of extant data resources, and the siloed nature of contextual effects research. We argue that the notions of activity space – capturing actual routine spatial exposures – and ecological networks – the aggregate structure of shared exposures – offer useful conceptual and analytic tools that address a number of the aforementioned challenges. These concepts also align well with key principles of life course research, including the role of agency in the construction of the sociospatial contexts of everyday experience, the historical and spatial specificity of life course trajectories and transitions, and the linkage of lives in space and time.