Department of Sociology, New York University, New York, New York 10012, USA.
AJS. 2011 May;116(6):1934-81. doi: 10.1086/660009.
This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, the authors argue for a revised perspective on "neighborhood effects" that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the next generation. To analyze multigenerational effects, the authors use newly developed methods designed to estimate unbiased treatment effects when treatments and confounders vary over time. The results confirm a powerful link between neighborhoods and cognitive ability that extends across generations. A family's exposure to neighborhood poverty across two consecutive generations reduces child cognitive ability by more than half a standard deviation. A formal sensitivity analysis suggests that results are robust to unobserved selection bias.
本研究考察了家庭多代人所经历的邻里环境如何影响儿童的认知能力。基于最近的研究表明，家庭成员几代人之间的邻里环境具有很强的连续性，作者提出了一种关于“邻里效应”的修正观点，即考虑一代人的邻里环境可能会对下一代产生持久影响的方式。为了分析多代效应，作者使用了新开发的方法，这些方法旨在估计当治疗和混杂因素随时间变化时无偏治疗效果。研究结果证实了邻里环境和认知能力之间的强大联系，这种联系可以跨越几代人。一个家庭连续两代经历邻里贫困，会使孩子的认知能力降低半个标准差以上。一项正式的敏感性分析表明，研究结果对未观察到的选择偏差具有稳健性。
