Philadelphia Family Management Study, 1991-2001

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.
<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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 the 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.

本项纵向研究旨在探究弱势家庭如何应对并管控其所在社区中的风险与机遇。研究团队尤为关注的核心问题是：这些家庭能否通过调整育儿方式，适配内城危险且受限的居住环境，从而改变子女的人生机遇。此外，本研究还探讨了社区的社会联结（或社会联结缺失）如何促使父母在子女青少年时期采用不同的管教策略。

研究共访谈了489名年龄介于11至14岁的儿童及其家长，这些家庭均居住于费城以白人或非裔美国人为主的贫困与工薪阶层社区。

访谈涵盖多维度主题，包括社区认知、父母管控风险与机遇的策略，以及父母与子女双方对青少年成长状况的评估指标。本研究从五个在种族与经济特征上均存在显著差异的社区中招募了足够数量的家庭，以此构建关于社区社会联结特征（如凝聚力、感知社会控制程度、社会交换规模与社会信任度）、资源可获得性与获取渠道、非正式社会网络的规模与构成，以及感知到的风险与机遇的聚合社区测度指标。