Suchergebnisse

Community studies indicating that affluence has social‐emotional consequences for youth have conflated family and neighborhood wealth. We examined adolescent boys' delinquency and adolescent girls' anxiety‐depression as a function of family, neighborhood, and cumulative affluence in a sample that is primarily of European–American descent, but geographically and economically diverse (N = 1,364). Boys in affluent neighborhoods reported higher levels of delinquency and girls in affluent neighborhoods reported higher levels of anxiety‐depression compared with youth in middle‐class neighborhoods. Neither family affluence nor cumulative affluence, however, placed boys or girls at risk in these domains. Indeed, boys' delinquency and girls' anxiety‐depression levels were lowest for those in affluent families living in middle‐class neighborhoods.

Studies suggest that affluence poses a risk for adolescents, but this has rarely been studied outside the United States. We examined the unique and additive roles of family and school affluence for adolescent outcomes among 10th‐grade students (n = 7,203) in Oslo, Norway. Multilevel models were estimated separately by gender. For both boys and girls, school affluence was a risk for alcohol abuse and family affluence was a risk for conduct problems, although for conduct the risk was only at the very highest end of income distribution and adolescents in very poor families were also at risk. There was also a complex pattern of risk for early sexual debut; family affluence posed risk, but school affluence appeared protective.