"Girls in public housing benefited emotionally from a move to a better neighborhood while boys fared worse than if they’d stayed in the poor neighborhood, a study partly funded by NIMH has found. Rates ofdepression and conduct disorder markedly increased in boys and decreased in girls. Boys also experienced significantly increased rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“Better understanding of interactions among individual, family, and neighborhood risk factors is needed to guide future public housing policy changes in light of these sex differences,” concluded the research team, which was headed by Ronald Kessler, Ph.D., of Harvard University, Jens Ludwig, Ph.D. , of the University of Chicago, and Jeffrey Kling, Ph.D. , of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Although not addressed by the study, they suggested that girls might have had better social skills to take advantage of opportunities offered by the better neighborhoods and presumably had different experiences there than boys.
The researchers reported their results March 4, 2014 in the Journal of the American Medical Association."
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