Urbanism and child mental health journal review
How much of an effect does your environment have on your mental health? Plenty. Does it mean you're doomed if your environment is supposedly negative? Not necessarily. What can we attribute the high rate of social and psychological problems in cities to? And, are urban areas predestined to be a hub for high social and psychological problems. The latter two are questions David Quinton is attempting to answer in the annotation titled " Urbanism and Child Mental Health ". In this commentary, Quinton reviews other researchers' data and attempts to explain the phenomena. The research primarily includes subjects from London's boroughs, as well as, urban areas from Oslo, Beijing and Kampala. Quinton notes a similar review by Freeman (1984) is in circulation, but it failed to consider the process of city rise and decay, the qualities of urban life and the impacts of the physical environment. Quinton begins by commenting that there are few studies of early childhood disorders that compare children in urban and rural areas within the same culture using the same assessment measures. Instead, studies rely on ecological correlations in bureaucratically limited areas. This data produced an unsurprising casual connection b
etween indicators such as housing features and deviance. He reviewed Lavik's 1977 study of disorder rates in Oslo with a rural sample, and surprise, behavior problems were more common in the city. However, the ecological fallacy - the inclination to draw conclusions from unrelated indicators - presents problems. Nevertheless if such a study were completed, the results wouldn't startle anyone. Quinton believes the answer to the research lies in two approaches he calls " life history and life events research ". Common sense tells me that a study of this magnitude is impossible, because so many elements are included in the growth of a person's personality. Basically, Quinton found the urban areas to have higher instances of negative actions in all the studies he reviewed. I expected an article complete with interviews, statistics and personal highlights similar to an NBC Dateline program. It's true inhabitants of the concrete jungle will always have a higher percentage of social and psychological problems. He thinks the history perspective is necessary to understand how families come to be in particular environments. The difficulty lies in the fact that the research encompasses so much and crosses discipline boundaries. Unfortunately, for urban area kids, a strong possibility exists that they'll never know about many of the opportunities. It'll determine where a person lives, who they'll interact with and what type of opportunities they'll have available to them. I've lived in Illinois, New Jersey and several cities in Europe, and it's about the same everywhere you go.
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