Pockets of Peace: Investigating Urban Neighborhoods Resilient to Adolescent Violence

How do some neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage promote low rates of adolescent violence?

Leech will extend prior research on resilient individuals—who do well despite significant challenges—to understand what characterizes resilient neighborhoods and how youth perceive them. She also plans to compare the social dynamics in resilient neighborhoods to those in other disadvantaged neighborhoods. She will work with two new mentors—Tama Leventhal, associate professor in the Department of Child Development at Tufts University, and Christopher Browning, professor of sociology at Ohio State University—to develop expertise integrating information about adolescents' everyday experiences into studies of neighborhood effects on adolescent well-being.