Neighborhood socioeconomic status and perceptions of self-efficacy

Following Bandura's (1982) social-cognitive theory of self-efficacy, Wilson (1996) hypothesizes a relationship between neighborhood-level socioeconomic status and individual-level perceptions of efficacy. This article evaluates this hypothesis and pursues the following research questions: (1) Are the socioeconomic characteristics of individual's neighborhoods related to their level of self-efficacy? and (2) if so, is this relationship simply due to lower individual-level socioeconomic status (SES), or is neighborhood SES associated with self-efficacy over and above individual-level SES? This project links individual-level data from a national sample of adults in the United States (Americans Changing Lives Survey [1986]) with contextual information from the 1980 census on the poverty and unemployment characteristics of respondents' neighborhoods. Results indicate that high proportions of neighborhood unemployment and public assistance are associated with low levels of self-efficacy above and beyond individual-level SES.