Housing: An Under-Explored Influence on Children’s Well-Being and Becoming

Research on housing has tended to focus on adult outcomes, establishing relationships between housing and a number of aspects of health and well-being. Research exploring the influence of housing on children has been more limited, and has tended to focus on adult concerns around risk behaviours, behavioural problems and educational attainment. While these outcomes are important, they neglect the impact of housing on children’s lives beyond these concerns. There are a number of reasons to believe that housing would play an important role in children’s well-being more broadly. Family stress and strain models highlight how housing difficulties experienced by adults may have knock on effects for children, while Bronfenbrenner’s ecological approach to human development emphasises the importance of children’s experiences of their environments, of which the home is among the most important. This paper summaries the existing evidence around housing and child outcomes, predominantly educational and behavioural outcomes, and argues for the extension of this work to consider the impact of housing on children’s lives more broadly, especially their subjective well-being

Peer group association, the acceptance of norms and violent behaviour: A longitudinal analysis of reciprocal effects

Differential association and social learning theory assume delinquent peers to be instigators and reinforcers of delinquent behaviour and norms favourable of delinquency. Control theory, on the other hand, assumes that delinquents will group together with peers that share a common normative and behavioural background. Interactional theory as an integrative paradigm argues that both – influence and selection – processes might be active simultaneously and are embedded in a reciprocal causal relationship. This paper tests the reciprocity between the association with delinquent peer groups, the acceptance of pro-violent norms and violent delinquency during adolescence with data from a German longitudinal panel study in a longitudinal structural equation model. Results indicate that peers, norms and violence are interactionally related and that influence and selection processes are active simultaneously. Moreover, further structural dimensions are able to explain delinquent peer group association, the acceptance of pro-violent norms and violence in early adolescence