Neighborhood Context and the Development of African American Children by Maria Loreto Martinez

Author:Maria Loreto Martinez [Martinez, Maria Loreto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317733874
Google: N_6nDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05T04:31:09+00:00

Chapter 4

Results

Analysis of the Perceived Neighborhood Scale

CFA was used to evaluate the adequacy of the hypothesized factor structure of the PNS at Time 3 and Time 5. Only parents who reported living in their neighborhood for at least one month were included in the analyses. Mean length of residence at Time 3 was 58.95 months (SD = 83.86) and ranged from 1- 444 months. At Time 5, the self-reported mean for length of residence was 91.87 months (SD = 122.8) and ranged from 1 - 531 months.

In order to have the same metric for all scale items, two items with a three-option format (i.e., presence of adult relatives and close friends in the neighborhood) were transformed to a five-option metric. Three dichotomous items were excluded from the analysis (i.e., one item that tapped availability of children as playmates and two items that dealt with victimization occurrences). As will be explained later, items dropped appeared not directly related to the neighborhood dimension they were intended to assess. Thus, for purposes of the analyses, the initial scale consisted of 39 items distributed as follows: 11 items for social embeddedness, 7 items for sense of community, 10 items for satisfaction with neighborhood, and 11 items for perceived crime.

As a preliminary step in the analysis, the assumption of multivariate normality required for Maximum Likelihood statistics was checked. Inspection of skewness and kurtosis estimates for each scale (i.e., social embeddedness, sense of community, satisfaction with neighborhood, and perceived crime) was carried out to detect deviations from normality. Minimal deviations from expected values were found at each point in time (see Table 3), providing support for the assumption of normally distributed variables required for subsequent analyses.

Table 3. Normality Distributions for CFA Model Variables

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