Behavioral and emotional risk and resilience among socially disadvantaged children in Canadian cities

Identifying the common factors that produce risk and resilience in children is an important step both in conducting an ecologically-based assessment and in designing ecologically-focused services. Although the effect of several individual, family, school, and community level factors on childhood behavioral and emotional problems and prosocial skills have been previously studied, there is a paucity of empirical research that has investigated them in combination. Factors that related to city characteristics are missing. The purpose of this study was to explore whether social and economic characteristics of a city influence the behavioral and emotional outcomes of Canadian children within socially disadvantaged families. To do so, a two-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) was developed using the first cycle of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth and the 1996 Census data gathered from 25 Canadian major cities. Prosocial behavior, hyperactivity-inattention, physical aggression-conduct disorder, indirect aggression, emotional disorder-anxiety, and property offences were examined through 6 child-level variables and 11 city-level variables.; The study included 2,362 children between 4 and 11 years of age who came from low SES families. HLM was used to examine the variation in socially disadvantaged children's behavioral and emotional outcomes within and between cities. The aim was to determine whether there are city "effects" that are associated with children's behavior and emotional outcomes regarding risk and resilience.; Results from this exploratory study identified several child and city characteristics that were significantly associated with children's behavioral and emotional outcomes, thus providing empirical evidence of the micro (child) and the macro (city) level of environmental effects on children's behavioral and emotional outcomes. The findings are consistent with an ecological theory that a child's social ecology consists of many different systems, each of which has the capacity to influence developmental outcomes. Although factors in the microsystem have much stronger impacts on low SES children's behavioral outcomes than factors in the macrosystem, the influence of the macrosystem should not be ignored. Implications for practice and recommendations for future research are provided in light of the findings.