Background: Public education reforms, such as expanded school choice, have become a critical lever for remaking urban landscapes. These reforms often aim to attract and retain affluent and White families in urban schools, so scholars have examined how these parents navigate the perceived risk of choosing these schools for their children. Purpose:…

Youth interpersonal firearm violence disproportionately affects Black youth, with residential racial segregation as a key determinant. Racially segregated neighborhoods, which are economically isolated (e.g., neighborhood disadvantage), are linked to increased exposure to violence. This exposure, in turn, is a determinant of youth firearm…

The present study examined changes in ethnic and racial identity (ERI) over one year among 353 Black and Latino early adolescents in relation to ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) and neighborhood economic and demographic characteristics. Parent and child reports of ERS were collected, and child ERI was assessed via self-report. Neighborhood…

Neighborhood-level collective efficacy protects Black youth from substance use; however, neighborhood research does not account for the entirety of adolescents' exposure or their perceptions of space which may be critical to understanding the role of context in substance use. To address this limitation, the SPIN Project recruited 65 Black…

Suburbs across the US are experiencing demographic shifts with consequences for suburban schools. While scholars have expressed concern about rising segregation among suburban public schools, we extend this work by examining changes in racial/ethnic school segregation across a typology of suburban municipalities in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin…

Largely overlooked in the empirical literature on gentrification are the potential effects school closures have in the process. This study begins to fill this gap by integrating longitudinal data on all U.S. metropolitan neighborhoods from the Neighborhood Change Database with data on the universe of school closures from the National Center for…

This study examines often-overlooked youth perspectives on the sociospatial changes happening in a community experiencing Black displacement, mass Latinx immigration, and impending gentrification. To date, studies of complex urban change rarely consider the ways in which young people perceive and produce place differently from adults. Drawing on…

Until the last quarter of the 20th century racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but is…

This project aims to gain a new understanding of redlining and the nature of how human beings occupy their time. Redlining was/is government sanctioned discriminatory race-based exclusionary tactics in real estate. Occupational science and adult learning tenets support the idea that how we occupy our time matters; Black Americans could not buy…

Using dyadic youth-adult interviews, the current study explored characteristics, benefits, and challenges of supportive youth-adult relationships for youths living in neighborhoods with high levels of community violence. Thirty-two dyads of youths between the ages 13 to 21 years (63% female, 88% Black) and their self-identified key adult supports…

Parenting stress is correlated with negative child and parent outcomes. Accurate parenting stress assessments are critical to inform appropriate service delivery. This study used mixed methods to identify stressors influencing parents of Black children with autism. Twenty-two parents of Black children with autism participated in individual…

Geography, as a social studies discipline, can be a powerful tool for students to explore how their social and political worlds have been built. In this sense, the discipline can be an affirmational, positive inquiry into how humans organize in and around spaces to form communities. It can also, however, be used to explore how discriminatory…

The current study examined whether racially minoritized children and racial majority children demonstrate different race-based learning preferences and whether the racial demographics of their schools and neighborhoods predict these preferences. Race-based information endorsement and teacher preferences of Black and White 3- to 7-year-old children…

Studies document inequitable tobacco retailer density by neighborhood sociodemographics, but these findings may not be robust to different density measures. Policies to reduce density may be less equitable depending on how the presence of store types differs by neighborhood characteristics. We built a 2018 list of probable tobacco retailers in the…

Although the current COVID-19 crisis is felt globally, at the local level, COVID-19 has disproportionately affected poor, highly segregated African American communities in Chicago. To understand the emerging pattern of racial inequality in the effects of COVID-19, we examined the relative burden of social vulnerability and health risk factors. We…