B3337 - Neighbourhood deprivation child conduct problems and adolescent delinquency - 24/07/2019

B number: 
B3337
Principal applicant name: 
Edward Dylan Barker | King's College London (United Kingdom)
Co-applicants: 
Helen Fisher, Joanne Newbury, Esther Walton, Laura Howe
Title of project: 
Neighbourhood deprivation, child conduct problems and adolescent delinquency
Proposal summary: 

Many adults in the United Kingdom suffer from psychological distress. Psychological distress can range from worrying a lot, to feeling down, to even more serious problems. Importantly, existing research suggests that adults with psychological difficulties often also have behavioural problems as children. Understanding how psychological distress develops is a crucial first step in helping us (i) identify which children are most at risk and (ii) develop targeted strategies to prevent or manage such problems. The reasoning here is that if we can prevent the development of psychological distress in childhood, these children will be less likely to show psychological distress as adults.

We already know that children who show conduct problems (e.g. fighting, lying, stealing) tend to come from riskier circumstances. For example, these children can have mothers with psychological difficulties. Moreover, mothers that have psychological difficulties tend to live in deprived neighbourhoods (e.g. poverty, crime, pollution, low access to greenspace such as parks with trees and grass). Here, the idea is that neighbourhood deprivation can associate with maternal psychological difficulties and family dysfunction, which in turn, can lead to less consistent, stimulating and more punitive parenting behaviours, and poorer child behavioural outcomes. However, characteristic of the parent(s), such as education, employment and psychological distress can play a role in the type of neighbourhood a child grows up in. These characteristics can also affect how vulnerable a parent is to stress-inducing features of the neighbourhood, and therefore could potentially affect the type of parenting used on a child.

During adolescence, youth spend less time with their families and more time “hanging out” with their peer groups (or friends). Therefore, youth are more directly exposed to the neighbourhood, including both structural (e.g. poverty, pollution, distance from green space) and social (crime and deviant peers) deprivation factors. Similar to the mothers, individual characteristics of a teenager can increase the likelihood that individual will be exposed to risk factors in the neighbourhood. Here, impulsivity (i.e., acting without thinking, thrill seeking) can influence the type of social environments for which an adolescent actively seeks out. Indeed, high impulsivity can lead to affiliation with other teenagers who are engaging in delinquent behaviours (e.g. fighting, lying, stealing), which in turn, can increase a teenager’s substance use, unsafe sexual activity and criminal behaviours. Thus, during adolescence, the individual characteristics of youth may associate with risk-related behaviours within the neighbourhood context.

To date, however, existing studies have not teased out the specific biological mechanisms that could explain how neighbourhood deprivation might relate to punitive parenting for the mother, or to a teenager “hanging” out with a deviant peer group. One potentially important biological factor of this kind is a ‘polygenic score’. A polygenic score gives you a genetic risk for some type of trait (e.g. depression, thrill seeking) or disease (e.g. cancer). These scores are based very large studies, sometimes over 1 million people, that show associations between traits or disease with genetic variants across the entire known genome. These different variants and then summed into a single “polygenic score” in smaller, independent studies.

In this study we plan to address two key potential limitations of existing research: (1) Existing studies have not examined how maternal polygenic risk for depression can affect harsh parenting and child conduct problems, particularly if living within high neighbourhood deprivation. (2) Existing studies have not assessed adolescent polygenic risk for externalising problems and impulsivity (e.g. ADHD, sensation seeking) associates with higher affiliation deviant peer affiliation, particularly if living within high neighbourhood deprivation.

This study will address each of these main limitations of the existing research. We are ideally placed to achieve these aims as we have access to psychological, parenting, behavioural, friendship and genetic data already collected from two very large scale samples of children, extensively studied from childhood and into adolescence (The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, in Southwest England and Generation R, Rotterdam, The Netherlands).

We hope that results from this research will help answer questions around why some caregivers are more likely to use punitive parenting, and why children are more likely to have conduct problems, and guide early intervention for high-risk children who may be prone to impulsive and thrill seeking behaviours.

Impact of research: 
At least two, and potentially a third: 1. Top tiered peer reviewed publications (e.g. JAMA Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry) 2. Conference presentations (e.g. Society for Research on Child Development, Biological Psychiatry) 3. Large scale dissemination: the PI (Barker) has an agreement with two factual TV production companies (Underworld TV, Dragon Fly TV) that results of the proposed research will be used to create the content for a "treatment" that will be pitched to Channel 4 or the BBC. The general ideas is to produce a factual programme on the link between neighbourhood deprivation and adolescent delinquency and gang affiliation.
Date proposal received: 
Friday, 28 June, 2019
Date proposal approved: 
Monday, 1 July, 2019
Keywords: 
Mental health - Psychology, Psychiatry, Cognition, Addiction - e.g. alcohol, illicit drugs, smoking, gambling, etc., Behaviour - e.g. antisocial behaviour, risk behaviour, etc., Mental health, Obesity, Sexually transmitted diseases, chlamydia, gonorrhoea, Computer simulations/modelling/algorithms, Statistical methods, BMI, Childhood - childcare, childhood adversity, Psychology - personality, Physical - activity, fitness, function, Puberty, Sleep, Communication (including non-verbal), Development, Environment - enviromental exposure, pollution, Genetic epidemiology, Genome wide association study, Intelligence - memory, Linkage, Parenting