CONTEXT Adolescent sexual behaviors are a significant public health concern because of the risks of STDs and the negative social consequences of teenage pregnancies. Associations between neighborhood characteristics and adolescents' initiation of sex and contraceptive use are poorly understood. METHODS Multilevel logistic regression analyses of data from 14,151 adolescents in grades 7-12 in W...

A graph is biclique-Helly when its family of (maximal) bicliques is a Helly family. We describe characterizations for biclique-Helly graphs, leading to polynomial time recognition algorithms. In addition, we relate biclique-Helly graphs to the classes of clique-Helly, disk-Helly and neighborhood-Helly graphs.

Background: Current study aimed to investigate whether perceived neighborhood as unsafe during adolescence predicts the subsequent perceived health two decades later. Methods: In a prospective study of an ethnically diverse urban sample (83.2% Black), conducted from 1994 to 2012, 851 adolescents were enrolled at 9th grade. Three hundred and seventy‐eight participants were followed from 9th grad...

Ecological approaches to explaining juvenile delinquency emphasize the importance of spatial influences on patterns of delinquency. Studies of recidivism among juvenile offenders, on the other hand, have rarely taken neighborhood influences into account. Moreover, conventional statistical approaches adapted for investigating spatial neighborhood effects, such as hierarchical linear modeling (HL...

Using data from a socioeconomically diverse sample of Chinese American children (n = 258, aged 6-9 years) in immigrant families, we examined the concurrent relations among neighborhood economic disadvantage and concentration of Asian residents, parenting styles, and Chinese American children's externalizing and internalizing problems. Neighborhood characteristics were measured with 2000 U.S. Ce...

In this article, I use data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study to examine the residential selections that households and individuals make when they change residences and, in particular, the relationship between their choices and their socioeconomic status. I evaluate outcomes across neighborhoods grouped into deciles and quintiles of advantage and disadvantage, where the neighbo...

Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measures neighborhood context only once and does not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates effects of duration of exposure t...

OBJECTIVE To better understand how neighborhood and individual factors are related to child maltreatment. METHOD Using an ecological framework, a multi-level model (Hierarchical Linear Modeling) was used to analyze neighborhood structural conditions and individual risk factors for child abuse and neglect. Parents (n = 400) of children under the age of 18 were systematically selected from 20 r...

Many recent articles have examined the delivery of family planning services to low-income areas. Some have described the implementation of specific regional family planning programs."5 Others have been more provocative, stressing that the government has a social responsibility to provide low-cost birth control to low-income neighborhoods."u Still others have used a cost-effectiveness analysis t...