“They Be Doing Illegal Things”

Abstract

Neighborhood research, the body of work examining how the built environment affects residents, has been actively pursued across the social sciences in the past decade. Within this work, researchers focus mainly on adult residents and rely on crude census reports to measure the neighborhood space. As there are many problems associated with census data, researchers are currently surveying residents about their perceptions of their neighborhoods. Since young people are not recognized in this research agenda, this paper describes a qualitative study with 10 early adolescents in New York City, aged 11 to 13 years, and their perceptions of their neighborhoods. Results from this study serve as a foundation for quantitative work exploring the relationship between different neighborhood measurements and their association to adolescents' health.