Moving on Down: The Conflated Impact of Family Instability and Disadvantaged Neighborhoods on Cognitive, Externalizing, and Internalizing Outcomes

Research indicates youth who face family instability have more negative outcomes than youth who remain in stable families. A gap in the literature is whether following family instability youth will move to a neighborhood with more disorder. Individuals that transition to neighborhoods with more disorder have profound negative effects in comparison to those who remain in higher quality neighborhoods. This study employs longitudinal data from the Fragile Families Study to determine whether family instability increases youths’ risk of movement to a lower quality neighborhood, and whether the effects of family instability in conjunction with movement to lower quality neighborhood impact educational outcomes, internalizing problem behaviors, and externalizing problem behaviors in comparison to youth only experiencing family instability. We find family instability significantly increases the odds of youth moving to lower quality neighborhoods, and youth display increased internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors following both family instability and movement to lower quality neighborhoods.