The Impact of School and Neighborhood Social Organization on the Academic Learning and Mental Health of Children and Early Adolescents in Urban Schools

Yuk Fai Cheong

The purpose of this project is twofold. The first objective is to investigate school and neighborhood organization effects on the academic and mental health development of children and early adolescents in urban settings, focusing on minority children from low socioeconomic strata. The investigation will use data from approximately 1,200 children and adolescents and their primary caretakers, collected by the Project of Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) Cohort Study (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997) and the Consortium on Chicago Research (CRC) over a period of seven years. The academic outcomes will be mathematics and reading scores obtained from the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS). Major mental health outcomes will be the internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors as measured by the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach, 1991). These include withdrawal, depression, anxiety, attention problems, aggression, and delinquency. The second objective of the project is to create and evaluate a statistical software program capable of analyzing a special class of cross-random effects statistical models. Such software will permit researchers to study the influences of multiple social contexts on child and adolescent development with methodological precision.

About Yuk Fai Cheong

Yuk Fai Cheong is an assistant professor of quantitative research methodology and educational research at Emory University. A native of Hong Kong, he worked as a high school teacher before receiving his master’s degree in educational systems development and his Ph.D. in measurement and quantitative methods from Michigan State University. He received the William J. Davis Memorial Award of the University Council for Educational Administration for Best Article of 1993, and an AERA Dissertation Grant from the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Education Statistics. Professor Cheong became an assistant professor at Emory University in 1999. He teaches courses on introductory and intermediate statistics for social sciences, introductory educational research, and schools and delinquency, and he conducts seminars on multivariate statistics and multilevel modeling. His program of research is composed of two related and ongoing lines of work, one methodological, the other conceptual. His methodological work focuses on multilevel statistical modeling in social sciences research, and his conceptual work centers on the study of social and personal factors that influence school learning, social development, and motivation of children and adolescents.