Space Meets Time: Integrating Temporal and Contextual Influences on Mental Health in Early Adulthood

By B. Wheaton, Philippa Clarke. American Sociological Review, 2003

374 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The integration of temporal life course perspectives and current social context perspectives is considered as a framework for the understanding of mental health differences in early adulthood, a formative stage in the development of long-term mental health differences. Using data from the National Survey of Children and a cross-nested random effects model to simultaneously assess the effects of current and past neighborhood, the authors find a lagged effect of childhood neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage on early adult mental health, while accounting for initial mental health status. This lagged effect also explains the apparent (bivariate) effect of current neighborhood. Four hypotheses are assessed to explain the lagged effect of neighborhood: contextual continuity, mental health continuity, life course stress accumulation, and ambient chronic stress in the neighborhood. Support is found for a cumulative mediating effect of both life course stress and ambient neighborhood stress as children grow up; together, these variables entirely explain the lagged effect of early neighborhood. Findings suggest the need for a more temporal life course approach to the specification of social context effects in general, focusing on the history of social contexts that individuals live in and move through. Temporal-contextual perspectives also encourage a focus on theoretical models that can differentially locate formative contextual influences at different stages in the life course.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/489ebf058e1f662ab884f77cc0fe6433b166cd57

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

In Health

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The Influence of Neighborhood Poverty During Childhood on Fertility, Education, and Earnings Outcomes (2007, neutral): “…Furstenberg et al., 1990; Haurin, 1992; McLanahan & Bumpass, 1988; Sawhill & Chadwick, 1999), acceptance of deviant behavior (Friedrichs & Blasius, 2003), mental illness (Wheaton & Clarke, 2003), and economic idleness (Haveman & Wolfe, 1994; Mayer, 1997; Payne, 1987; Sawhill & Chadwick, 1999).”
Socioeconomic Context, Social Support, and Adolescent Mental Health: A Multilevel Investigation (2006, background): “ Wheaton and Clarke (2003) found that current neighborhood disadvantage has no effect on early adult internalizing problems when childhood neighborhood disadvantage is controlled, negating a contextual continuity hypothesis positing that neighborhood contexts are sufficiently stable over time that ”
Exposure to Neighborhood Affluence and Poverty in Childhood and Adolescence and Academic Achievement and Behavior (2014, background): “A minimal amount of empirical research, however, has explored whether neighborhood influences are particularly salient during adolescence or the issue of developmental timing and neighborhood exposure more generally (as exceptions, see Sastry & Pebley, 2010; Wheaton & Clarke, 2003).”
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College (background): “Realizing that context, intended as the sum of all the circumstances that may come into play around a work of art, could be in-definitely extended, it has argued that therefore total context is impossible to establish.”