Philadelphia family management survey

This longitudinal study was undertaken to explore how disadvantaged families respond to and manage risk and opportunity in their communities. Of special interest to the research team was the question of whether families alter their children's life chances by successfully adapting their parenting styles to the dangerous and restrictive conditions of living in the inner city. Also, this study addresses how the social organization of the neighborhood-or the absence of organization-leads parents to adopt different techniques of managing their children during adolescence. A sample of 489 children between the ages of 11 and 14 and their parents were interviewed. The families lived in predominately White or African American poor and working-class neighborhoods in Philadelphia. The interviews consisted of a wide range of topics including perceptions of community, parental strategies for managing risks and opportunities, and measures from both parents and children of how the youth were faring. The study gathered enough families from each of the five different neighborhoods which were racially and economically contrasting to develop aggregate community measures of features of social organization (such as degree of cohesiveness, the perceived level of social control, the amount of exchange, and social trust), availability and access to resources, size and composition of informal networks, and perceived dangers and opportunities. The Murray Center has computer-accessible data.