The Design of a Multilevel Survey of Children, Families, and Communities: The Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey

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  • 1 January 2003
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      • Published in RePEc
Abstract
In the last fifteen years, there has been a growing interest in the role of neighborhoods in shaping a variety of outcomes for children, adults, and families. Although theoretical perspectives are well advanced and the basic statistical methods for modeling neighborhood effects are in place, a major shortcoming concerns the limitations of existing datasets. Past surveys concerned with understanding children's outcomes have not been designed with the explicit goal of supporting multilevel modeling. This makes it difficult to address the most important unresolved research issue in this area, which is to develop an understanding of the causal effects of neighborhoods factors. In this paper, we describe the development and implementation of the sampling design for the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study (L.A.FANS), a survey of children, adults, families, and neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. This survey was designed to support multilevel studies on a number of topics, including child development, residential mobility, and welfare reform. We describe the design of the baseline wave, highlighting the analytical and statistical issues that shaped the study. We also present the results of an in-depth statistical investigation of the survey's ability to support multilevel analyses that was carried out as part of the study design. The results of this study provide important guideposts for future studies of neighborhoods and their effects on adults and children.

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