Introduction

In this section, we briefly raise three topics that are part of the broader context of adolescent development, specifically with a view to establishing what we know about their importance in adolescent mental health outcomes and also – as with the other chapters in this volume – with a view to assessing evidence for social change in these areas over recent decades. Our aim here, as with the other chapters in this volume, was to highlight key findings and identify interesting avenues for further research, although in this instance we have chosen to present brief introductions to these topics with pointers to fruitful areas for future research, rather than full summaries of these complex research topics. We identify the key challenges, and also the interesting new developments in these fields that will undoubtedly keep them at the forefront of work on young people's well-being in coming years.

Young people spend a great deal of time in their neighbourhoods, possibly more than anyone else except perhaps mothers with young children. Young people often go to school locally, and spend a great deal of time unsupervised in their local areas. How do neighbourhoods affect young people's well-being? There may be direct effects, and there may also be indirect effects that are mediated through families and schools. Given the different ways in which they spend time in their local area, we cannot assume that the demonstration of neighbourhood effects (or lack of demonstration) with adult samples means the same thing in adolescent samples. We have to be careful about generalising from any other age group. Taken together, this means taking the social structure outside the family seriously, and looking for measures of its importance specifically for young people.

As part of the Changing Adolescence Programme, a team led by Professor Sarah Curtis at Durham University undertook a scoping review of research on neighbourhood effects on adolescent mental health for the Nuffield Foundation, which has informed the first part of this chapter in particular. We draw partly on the studies identified in that review, and also on other work, in order to highlight some of the key findings. There are clear overlaps with the material covered in the time use review, substance use review and the schools review, and we return later to the need to link these areas.