Housing mobility and adolescent mental health: The role of substance use, social networks, and family mental health in the Moving to Opportunity Study.

ABSTRACT: The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment was a housing mobility program begun in the mid-nineties that relocated volunteer low income families from public housing to rental units in higher opportunity neighborhoods in 5 US cities, using the Section 8 affordable housing voucher program. Compared to the control group who stayed behind in public housing, the MTO voucher group exhibited a harmful main effect for boys' mental health, and a beneficial main effect for girls' mental health. But no studies have examined how this social experiment caused these puzzling, opposite gender effects. The present study tests potential mediating mechanisms of the MTO voucher experiment on adolescent mental health (n=2829, aged 12-19 in 2001-2002). Using Inverse Odds Ratio Weighting causal mediation, we te

SUBMITTER: Schmidt NM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5663282 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature