Dangerous Neighborhoods Lead to More Aggressive Children, Global Study Suggests

Aggressive behavior is exhibited most often in children who grow up in so-called "dangerous neighborhoods," a new study led by Duke University reports.

Many studies have linked aggressive behavior in US children to the place where they grew up, so for the Duke study, researchers surveyed children growing up in neighborhoods around the world to determine if the trend held true.

Of nearly 1,300 parents and children surveyed in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand and the US, the researchers found that aggressive behavior in children could be linked to the area where they grew up.

The researchers asked families a series of questions about the dangers of their neighborhoods, and based on these answers, the researchers ranked the various neighborhoods in the study with a level of danger.

Children's aggression was measured with a widely-used child behavior survey that takes into account behaviors such as screaming and threatening people. For each family included in the survey, the researchers queried both parents and all their children.

In all nine countries, the level of aggression in children could be correlated to the level of danger in their neighborhoods.

"This is an incredibly diverse set of countries from around the world, representing countries from the developing and the developed world and including individualistic and collectivist societies," said lead author Ann Skinner, a researcher with Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy. "In all the countries we studied, we see that living in a dangerous neighborhood may affect kids negatively."

In all nine countries, children who lived in dangerous neighborhoods were subject to harsher parenting conditions, the researchers found.

Skinner said a future study is in order to determine whether dangerous neighborhoods lead parents to practice harsher parenting techniques.

Skinner and her colleagues' work is published in the journal Societies.