Imagine that you are the mayor of a city of about 100,000 residents. Similar to many other cities, yours has a mixture of rich and poor neighborhoods. Because you and one of your key advisers were sociology majors in college, you both remember that the type of neighborhoods in which children grow up can influence many aspects of their development. Your adviser suggests that you seek a large federal grant to conduct a small field experiment to test the effects of neighborhoods in your city. In this experiment, 60 families from poor neighborhoods would be recruited to volunteer. Half of these families would be randomly selected to move to middle-class neighborhoods with their housing partially subsidized (the experimental group), and the other 30 families would remain where they are (the control group). A variety of data would then be gathered about the children in both groups of families over the next decade to determine whether living in middle-class neighborhoods improved the children’s cognitive and social development.

You recognize the potential value of this experiment, but you also wonder whether it is entirely ethical, as it would be virtually impossible to maintain the anonymity of the families in the experimental group and perhaps even in the control group. You also worry about the political problems that might result if the people already in the middle-class neighborhoods object to the new families moving into their midst. Do you decide to apply for the federal grant? Why or why not?

A strong body of research indeed indicates that the type of neighborhoods in which children grow up can influence many aspects of their development. And that the very division of neighborhoods into rich and poor can cause many of subsequent problems, like crime, drug abuse, school dropouts, discrimination.

As a mayor, you may suggest that for each neighborhood to have its own the school, only further exacerbates these problems, You may propose a project of merging schools of two neighborhoods, but the community is strongly against it. Meanwhile, a locally done research can change the public views and serve as a better justification for your proposal.

The challenges that this research presents are manageable. In particular, the anonymity of the families in the longitudinal study your planning to organize has to be maintained on the side of interpreting and reporting studies results. Respective confidentiality agreements also have to be concluded with all of the participants.

Regarding political issues, increasing social mobility in rich neighborhoods should support be of a supportive factor for this research. Newly rich families often move to rich neighborhoods, while families who have lost their wealth have to move out. In addition, some modern families do not care as much about attributes of their status, especially in the millennial generation, thus it becomes harder to identify how rich or poor a family actually is.