About L.A.FANS

The Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS) is a study of adults, teens, children, and neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. Our goal is to understand: how neighborhoods affect a variety of outcomes, including children’s development and well-being and stress and health among children and adults.

Research suggests that safe, supportive neighborhoods are important for children, teens, and adults. But what makes a neighborhood a positive place to live? L.A.FANS will help to answer this question by comparing the lives of children and adults in a broad range of neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County.

L.A.FANS also provides information on service planning areas for communities, organizations, and local government. This information is used to help improve and expand services for children and families in Los Angeles County.

In 2000-2001, we interviewed 3,000 families in 65 neighborhoods as part of Wave 1 of L.A.FANS. For Wave 2, which is being fielded over a 20-month period in 2006-2008, we are reinterviewing these families as well as new families who moved into these neighborhoods.

L.A.FANS is conducted by the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research organization in Santa Monica, in collaboration with the UCLA School of Public Health. Each interview is conducted by a professional interviewer from Research Triangle Institute (RTI).

Frequently Asked Questions About L.A.FANS

What questions does L.A.FANS address?
Why is this study important?
What kinds of data are being collected?
What is the timeline for the collection and release of the L.A.FANS data?
Why should I be interested in Los Angeles?

1. What questions does L.A.FANS address?

L.A.FANS is specifically designed to answer key research and policy questions in three areas:

Neighborhood, family, and peer effects on children's development
Neighborhoods and peers may have a substantial effect on children's and teens' behavior and health, their attitudes toward education and work, their chances of becoming a teenage parent, and their educational and employment opportunities. Yet evidence about the influence of families, neighborhoods, and peers is limited. L.A.FANS traces the neighborhood and family roots of children's successes and failures in several areas: cognitive development, school performance, behavioral and emotional development, health, youth violence and crime, drug and alcohol abuse, and adolescent pregnancy.

Effects of welfare reform at the neighborhood level
The effects of welfare reform are likely to vary greatly among neighborhoods in Los Angeles County because of availability of employment, transportation, day care, and private social service providers. The response and adaptation of neighborhoods and communities to policy changes may also help determine whether welfare reform is successful. L.A.FANS is designed to measure over time local-level differences in the response to and effects of welfare reform in Los Angeles County.

Residential mobility and neighborhood change
Moving from one town or neighborhood to another can be an important means of upward (or downward) social mobility. Residential mobility can also change the character of neighborhoods for those who live there. While general patterns of residential mobility are well known, there is little information about factors behind choices families make about moving or staying, and where to move. Local-level mobility patterns of new immigrant families are another important issue on which there is little information. The L.A.FANS provides micro-level data to study residential mobility, neighborhood selections, the processes leading to residential segregation, and migration patterns of recent immigrant families.

2. Why is this study important?

Research strongly suggests that the environment in which children grow up affects their physical, psychological and social development, and their opportunities and successes in life. Most research has focused narrowly on the effects of family and home environment or school characteristics on children's development and school performance. Neighborhoods are another important part of a child's environment, but have received considerably less attention. Moreover, previous research on neighborhood effects has been criticized because it does not take into account the fact that families make choices about the neighborhood in which they live.

L.A.FANS is specifically designed to study both family choices about neighborhoods and the effects of neighborhoods on children. Studying both issues at the same time provides a solid basis for understanding neighborhood effects on children. By focusing on policy issues such as welfare reform, the L.A.FANS also provides evidence on how policy changes can affect the neighborhoods and families in which children are raised.

3. What kinds of data are being collected?

Sampled households complete a set of questionnaires that ask about education, employment, use of social services, social ties, residential mobility, family life, neighborhood conditions and involvement, and children's well-being.

In Wave 2 of L.A.FANS, biomarkers of stress and health are being collected.

As part of L.A.FANS Wave 1, trained field interviewers completed systematic observations of the physical and social environments of the 65 L.A.FANS Neighborhoods.

The L.A.FANS sample includes 40-50 households in each of the 65 neighborhoods. Wave 1 includes approximately 3200 children and teens under 18 years of age.

4. What is the timeline for the collection and release of the L.A.FANS data?

Data collection of Wave 1 (L.A.FANS-1) began in April 2000 and ended in mid-January 2002. The L.A.FANS-1 Public Use Data and documentation are currently available for download through this Web site. L.A.FANS Restricted Data are also available to researchers who meet certain requirements and submit an application to RAND.

Fieldwork for Wave 2 of L.A.FANS (L.A.FANS-2) began in the fall of 2006 and will continue into 2008. We expect the L.A.FANS-2 Public Use Data to be available in late 2008. Information on the progress of L.A.FANS-2 fieldwork will be available on this website and an announcement will also appear here about the release date for the L.A.FANS-2 data.

5. Why should I be interested in Los Angeles?

Why should I be interested in Los Angeles? Most knowledge about the social ecology of urban areas and the effects of neighborhoods on children comes from older industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest, including Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia. An increasing proportion of American children are growing up in newer Western and Southwestern cities, which have very different infrastructure, physical layouts, histories, and growth and residential segregation patterns, and about which we know relatively little. Los Angeles is the largest and most complex of these newer cities and an important model (both negative and positive) for other cities in the region.

Los Angeles County is also large, complex, and very diverse. It includes 88 cities and a number of unincorporated areas, spread over 4083 square miles. Services for children and families are provided by city governments, 20 county departments, 81 school districts, and thousands of neighborhood, municipal, and countywide agencies, both public and private. The total 2000 county population of about 9.5 million was 45% Latino, 31% white, 13% Asian-Pacific Islander, and 10% African American. Los Angeles is also a major destination for immigrants: in 2000 about 30% of the population was foreign born.

Related Resources