1.

Citation (ASA Style):

Kulis, Stephen, Flavio Francisco Marsiglia, Diane Sicotte, and Tanya Nieri.
2007.
"NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS ON YOUTH SUBSTANCE USE IN A
SOUTHWESTERN CITY." Sociological Perspectives 50:273-301.

The thesis of this article draws upon cigarette, alcohol, and marijuana use among Mexican
immigrants. It uses adaptation and acculturation theories to explain the occurrences.

The participants are chosen from 35 Phoenix middle schools. They are all in the seventh
grade and range from 11 to 17. The whole school was required to take the questionnaire but
only the Mexican and white students had their surveys tabulated. After throwing out some of
the surveys it left the researchers with 3,721 respondents with almost equal amounts of
males and females.

Like I mentioned earlier the researchers conducted surveys in local urban middle schools in the
Phoenix area. From the surveys they were able to draw upon the cigarette, alcohol, or marijuana
use in the past 30 days. When looking into the environment and neighborhoods in which these
kids lived they were able to use the school’s district and draw their conclusions from there since
most kids went to the school they were closest to. Also on the survey were questions regarding
their language use and how their home was set up in regards to their parents. In other words they
were asked which language they used more between the choices of English or Spanish, both was
an acceptable answer. Finally they tabulated the percent of the Mexican students who had free or
reduced lunches at the schools. This was used as barometer for the child’s family income level.
5.What were the primary findings of the
research?
As far as findings are concerned they were prettyBibliography
Annotated typical of other tests done on Latino subjects.
Mexican culture does spur the typeWorksheet
of activities that American culture tends to. Mexican children
and families that find themselves acculturated with American values and norms record higher
Review the directions
occurrences and
of substance How
abuse. to Prepare
That an Annotated
includes using English fluently as well as adopting norms of
Bibliography
the environment in which one lives. Since children learn languages faster then adults do it causes a
rift between the children and the parents which limits the parent’s ability to police their kids as
well. Another factor that seems to heighten substance abuse includes that of location and
neighborhoods. Those living in or just at the poverty level have higher occurrences of substance
abuse. In other words, in impoverished areas of Phoenix drugs, sex and violence are much more
prevalent for older folks which also filter down to the younger ones as well.

2.What is the primary research question or thesis of this

article?

3.What are the characteristics of the population studied? How many people, ages,
genders, race/ethnicity/nationality, professions, etc.? How were these people
selected?
6.Critique this article, discuss method, findings, analysis, writing style, or other
elements of the research project.

The authors presented a very good case. It seems the popular argument
in many of these journals is the propensity for American society in
influence immigrants negatively instead of positively. Unfortunately it
appears that the evidence speaks for itself.
As far as the experiment went, it appears it went as well as could be
expected. Not being an expert in the field but being a former seventh
grader, I would be curious as to how accurate those surveys were
especially
4.What researchdealing withwas
method(s) issues that are
employed by probably not as Was
the researchers? prevalent in their for the
this appropriate
lives asand
population onethe
may think. question?
research I think not taking
Were that
there into account
limitations to thiscould
method?
possibly lead to some unforeseen skewing of the results. But thankfully
the article was written well and was concise enough to keep the focus
where it needed to be. But in the end like all experiments, the scope is
narrowed, and the researchers want to find the outliers and they usually
do.