Trilhos Alternativos (Alternative Paths) is a community-based program that aims to integrate African-Portuguese urban youth from low-income families into Portuguese society. This article describes the first year of the program and presents formative data about effectiveness of the program. The motivation system seems to be an indirect variable…

Used model of mediated effects to test processes of influence from parents' and teachers' expectations to sixth-grade outcomes. Results revealed that perceptions only partially mediated the effects of expectations to sixth-grade reading and math outcomes, yet added unique independent variance to these outcomes. Prior achievement emerged as…

In 1976, thousands of low-income African Americans, mostly women and children, began to move out of the public housing developments of Chicago, Illinois, to the mostly white middle class suburbs. These families were part of the Gautreaux program, one of the largest court-ordered desegregation efforts in the United States. This book tells the story…

Reviews articles about Chicago Longitudinal Study and determines that the key questions are: How are circumstances and outcomes linked? How strongly do circumstances affect outcomes? How can school psychologists use prevention research to improve the academic and social well-being of the children they serve? Suggests that school psychologists need…

A longitudinal study of urban (Baltimore) black teenage mothers and their welfare experiences following the birth of their first child was started in the 1960s by Frank Furstenberg and has continued for more than 20 years. Information was gathered from 3 generations of the families of 300 women. Most of the school-aged mothers were not married at…

This study explores the influence of neighborhood conditions on child maltreatment. Unlike previous studies conducted with protective services data aggregated to neighborhoods, this study uses a self-report measure of child abuse potential and controls for individual risk factors in a multilevel model. The survey was completed by an adult residing…

Marin City is an isolated African American community located in mostly affluent Marin County, California. Thirty-six percent of households in Marin City fall below the poverty line. This report provides three case studies from the Marin City Families First (MCFF) program, an intervention that aims to develop a model comprehensive child and family…

Comments on the articles in this special issue on research from the Chicago Longitudinal Study. Analysis concludes that resilience is a highly combinatorial process, and is dependent on the capacity of individuals in a supportive social network to perceive these declines in functioning by the existence of these risky events present in low income,…

This paper describes the economic status of the African American family in Cleveland (Ohio) and in the United states as a whole and describes a model of interactions of social forces and economic factors that have influenced the declining earnings of African American families. The proportion of African American families in poverty in the United…

Provides overview of the Chicago Longitudinal Study which traces the educational and social success of a large sample of low-income children from high-poverty neighborhoods in the Chicago area. The articles in this special issue highlight the contributions of school mobility, parent involvement, educational expectations, and other family and…

The stories of five young black men growing up in the Roxbury area of Boston (Massachusetts) in the late 1960s and early 1970s illustrate the difficulties and coping required to reach adulthood in the city. The young men were part of the Pathways to Identity project of Harvard University, a longitudinal study that has, since 1966, interviewed 61…

In 1997, the Institute for Children and Poverty of Homes for the Homeless joined with more than 58 organizations from 10 cities across the country to develop a national snapshot of family homelessness in the United States. Nearly 800 families were surveyed. This report presents the results of this research. The typical homeless family in the…

In response to the increasing numbers of homeless families, Homes for the Homeless surveyed families in emergency shelters in Newark (New Jersey) to gain some insights into the characteristics and circumstances of urban homeless families. Newark was chosen because it is a large urban center with a high concentration of welfare recipients that is…

Thirteen papers explore the African American experience of poverty and ghetto formation; forces shaping contemporary urban poverty; and mobility and family strategies among groups differentiated by ethnicity, race, and labor market position. The introduction, "The Urban 'Underclass' as a Metaphor of Social Transformation" (M. B. Katz),…

The deeply fractured nature of U.S. society is examined, focusing on poor and working class people in cities. Based on data from 154 poor and working class young adults aged 23 to 35, the study reveals the ways in which this urban generation has suffered from social change. The following chapters are included: (1) "Voices of Hope and Despair:…