Putting Families Into Place: Using Neighborhood‐Effects Research and Activity Spaces to Understand Families

Neighborhood is an important context in which individuals and families are embedded. Yet family studies researchers have been relatively slow to incorporate spatial approaches into family science. Although limited theoretical and methodological attention has been devoted to families in neighborhood‐effects research, family scholars can contribute greatly to theories about neighborhood effects, and neighborhood‐effects research can help move the field of family studies forward. This article reviews the theories, applications, and limitations of research on neighborhood effects and discusses how family studies can benefit from incorporating a spatial perspective from neighborhood‐effects research. I then present an innovative methodology—referred to as activity spaces—emerging in neighborhood‐effects research, and I discuss how this approach can be used to better understand the complexity and heterogeneity of families. Last, I highlight ways to incorporate space into family studies by “putting families into place.”