Youth of color disproportionately live in neighborhoods with higher amounts of ambient stressors such as violence and crime. Associate Dean for Research Jaime Booth has been working with youth who live in the Homewood neighborhood in Pittsburgh to conduct cutting-edge research surrounding this issue in an effort to address this disparity.
The SPIN (Space and People In Neighborhoods) Project is a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded project which seeks to engage youth in identifying safe and risky spaces in their neighborhood, to understand the relationship between exposure to these spaces, stress and substance use, and works to increase youth access to safe spaces while addressing spaces that are potentially risky.
The goal of the SPIN project is to “understand how black youth are experiencing space and how that might be contributing to their overall sense of stress and whether or not they’re needing to use substances or using substances to cope with that stress” says Booth. There is a plethora of research on neighborhoods but not a lot of understanding on micro spaces and how youth experience those neighborhoods.
“A lot of substance use prevention says ‘you need to change your behavior’…. rather than thinking about environment,” said Booth. The SPIN project aims to identify both areas of stress and areas of support in the Homewood community and encourage interaction in spaces where youth feel supported.
The Youth Research Advisory Board (YRAB) is a key component of the SPIN project. Booth invited 11 youth from Homewood to comprise the board to collaborate on research efforts and provide insight and feedback. “Both the Youth Research Advisory Board and the participants in the study really enjoyed it,” said Booth. The board structured the incentives for the study, providing a free cellphone for each individual who participated. “Our goal was to recruit 60 [participants] and we were on a waitlist within two weeks,” said Booth. “That was the thing that really got folks excited.”
Booth and the board meet on a weekly basis, go out for food and even traveled to Philadelphia to present their research. “I really wanted to make the space fun,” said Booth. “We created a fun informal space, but weaved into that we learned about measurement, surveys, sampling, all of that stuff, through actually doing the work.”
Booth’s research findings were unexpected based on her conversations she had with the Youth Research Advisory Board about their own experiences in their community spaces. “Some things like walking on the street in their own neighborhood surprised me,” said Booth. “I wouldn’t expect youth to report racial discrimination when walking down the street in a segregated neighborhood with 95% black folks that live there—that was more of a surprising finding.”
Regarding substance abuse and stress, Booth found that collective efficacy impacted the levels of stress and substance abuse. Collective efficacy is the “sense that people in the neighborhood would intervene if something was going wrong or if there was illegal behavior,” said Booth. She found that individuals who felt collective efficacy in their home neighborhood experienced lower stress and less marijuana use.
Booth plans to conduct more qualitative analysis during the next iteration of the study and looks forward to continuing this critical collaborative work.