Research
I examine contextual influences on child and adolescent development through two main lines of research:
(1) How do neighborhood, school, and family contexts shape developmental processes such as youth mental health, academic engagement, and parent-child interactions?
(2) How can social policies that aim to alter these contexts more equitably serve diverse populations and mitigate structural inequality?
These two lines of work are linked by their focus on the intersections between macro-system (e.g., racism, classism, sexism) and micro-system (e.g., neighborhood, family, school) contexts, and their use of a socio-historical, strengths-based perspective.
I use a variety of methods, including causal inference analyses of linked survey, Census, and large-scale administrative data, quasi-experimental and experimental impact evaluations of social policies and programs (e.g., natural experiments, randomized controlled trial evaluations), online survey experiments, and qualitative methods.
View my Google Scholar page, CV, or email me for more information.
Contexts of Child and Adolescent Development
What are the developmental implications of growing up in a gentrifying neighborhood?
Children today are growing up in an extremely unequal world. Economic inequality is especially visible in formerly disinvested, gentrifying neighborhoods, where newly constructed million-dollar homes stand juxtaposed to the more modest homes and apartment buildings of lower-income, long-term residents. For youth living in such neighborhoods, rapid gentrification brings exposure to dramatic and often racialized forms of economic inequality, the implications of which have yet to be fully examined in the developmental science literature.
My dissertation used longitudinal data from linked administrative records, Census, and survey data to examine how growing up in a gentrifying (versus non-gentrifying) low-income neighborhood relates to youth academic engagement and mental health. I found:
Small positive associations between gentrification and youths’ GPA and plans to pursue higher education, but primarily among relatively advantaged youth—White youth and those from higher-income backgrounds.
For Black youth, gentrification was linked to higher intentions to pursue higher education, but only in neighborhoods that did not become increasingly White as they gentrified.
In addition, for youth with low subjective socioeconomic status, there was a negative indirect effect of gentrification on math achievement via heightened psychological distress.
By challenging the assumption that proximity to higher-income, higher-educated peers will benefit youth from disadvantaged backgrounds, these findings add critical nuance to dominant theoretical and policy perspectives regarding how neighborhoods affect racial and cultural inequities in youth development.
2 manuscripts from this work are currently under review (available upon request), one solo-authored and one co-authored with Rick Hoyle and Candice Odgers.
How can school diversity approaches promote, or inhibit youth mental health and academic outcomes?
Schools can reduce racial disparities in academic engagement by recognizing and valuing diversity, for example through institutional rhetoric, policies, or activities that celebrate minoritized identities. But what happens when schools make a public commitment to diversity, without actually acting on their commitment? In another dissertation project, I used individual-level survey and administrative data from North Carolina to examine contextual variation in the relation between multicultural versus color-evasive diversity ideologies and adolescent school belonging, mental health, and reading and math achievement. Findings show for the first time the potential developmental implications of a mismatch between what schools say versus what they do when it comes to diversity values. Across two different datasets, schools’ stated support for diversity (via a pro-diversity mission statement) was related to adolescent psychological distress, reading, and math achievement, but in nuanced ways depending on how such values were reflected in the school environment and students' racial/ethnic background.
Manuscript currently under review (available upon request), co-authored with Sarah Gaither & Anna Gassman-Pines.
Photo credit: NYT (left); Creative Commons (right).
Evaluations of Policies & Programs that Aim to Strengthen Children's Contexts
What is the effect of housing stability, quality, and the creation of mixed-income neighborhoods on youth mental and behavioral health?
I am currently collaborating on a mixed-methods, natural experiment of public housing redevelopment funded by an R01 NIH Grant (PIs: Rebekah Levine Coley & Samantha Teixeira, Boston College). Using Wave 1 quantitative and qualitative data from this project, I am leading a study examining how neighborhood intergroup (cross-race) interactions, racially biased treatment by property management and police, and attachment to place predict mental and behavioral health (paper accepted for presentation at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall 2023 conference).
What explains racial disparities in participation in home visit parenting programs?
Home visiting programs are one of the most widely delivered types of family support services in the U.S., yet at least 40% of eligible families do not participate, and there is also evidence of racial disparities in participation rates, with Black families being significantly less likely to participate compared to White and Latine families. Why? One yet untested hypothesis is that racialized state-sponsored surveillance of family life (via the Child Welfare System) spills over to negatively impact Black parents’ interest in home visiting services.
With co-authors Imari Z. Smith, Zoelene Hill, and Lisa A. Gennetian, I examined this hypothesis using focus groups and interviews with Black parents in North Carolina (N=35), an online survey of racially diverse parents across the U.S. (N=1,282), and a second online survey of Black parents and with an embedded survey experiment. Our findings show that parents associate the term "home visits" with surveillance (e.g., a state agency checking whether parents are “fit” to parent), and associating “home visits” with surveillance was linked to lower participation in parenting programs. Further, priming Black parents to think about the Child Welfare System (versus a neutral control prompt) had a negative effect on interest in participating in parenting programs. However, framing programs in a way that makes their aim clear–i.e., a “new baby wellness program” rather than a “home visit parenting program”–increased interest in learning more and participating.
Together, these studies show how racialized surveillance spills over to negatively affect participation in home visiting and demonstrate one small way that practitioners can reduce racial disparities in participation–changing the name–to avoid cueing fears of surveillance (paper presented at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall 2022 conference, manuscript in preparation for submission, available upon request).
International Work
Other published projects in this line of work include studies conducted prior to my Ph.D. evaluating the effects of home visit parenting programs on early childhood development in Latin America (Leer & Lopez Boo, 2018, Lopez Boo, Leer, & Kamei, 2020), exploring how home visiting moderates the negative effects of political violence in Nicaragua (Leer, Lopez Boo & Norman, 2023), co-designing and evaluating a community-based gender norms interventions West Africa (Leer et al., 2022), and testing how decentralized school governance exacerbates urban/rural divides in school quality in Indonesia (Leer, 2016).