Understanding how places impact people’s health, education and employment has long been a focus of policy and academic discourse. The idea that the area someone grows up in can have an impact on their later life is appealingly intuitive. However, accurately determining the effect that place has on people’s lives is difficult, and previous research has shown a wide range of supposed effects ranging from harmful to beneficial to none. For example, people who live in extremely deprived neighbourhoods have poorer chances of gaining employment, are more likely to participate in deviant behaviour, and are more likely to be unhealthy in later life. However, other academic research has suggested that the presence of positive effects is the result of unmeasured confounding factors including selective residential mobility, alongside individual characteristics such as family environment and genetic composition.

Whilst longitudinal analysis has long been embraced by the neighbourhood effects literature it has tended to focus on the adults. As a result, the context in which children grow up has been relatively overlooked and although environments experienced in adulthood are important, experiences during childhood condition adult outcomes strongly. The research proposed in this proposal is designed to investigate the way in which neighbourhoods effect children as they transition from childhood into adulthood once factors relating to family and school context, personality, and genetics have been considered. It will use cutting edge methods to provide new insight into the way in which effects at multiple scales combine and interact to influence importance social outcomes. In particular, the work will bring together the ideas of what, who and where someone is as a means to understand their development.