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A growing body of studies explore how the neighbourhood may affect it’s residents. The crucial question is whether place-related factors have an independent effect on individual life chances. Hardly any studies trying to quantify such area effects have information on actual social contacts and relations (type, strength, frequency, with whom). Instead, they make use of a variety of characteristics of the residents: compositional variables that must be seen as proxies for the social interactions and social processes through which neighbourhood effects are thought to operate. The current paper take as a basis a group of neighbours that has a lot of contact. We might call them “the significant others” of the neighbourhood: children and youths of the same age and their parents. Starting already with organised groups for parents expecting children continuing in the post-natal period, leisure activities, kinder gartens and schools, most of these families have a lot of contact over several years. Through social processes taking place at these arenas weak and strong ties are developed forming networks.

The paper explores the role of “the significant others” of the neighbourhood for children and youths, and especially the role of local arenas for secondary socialization. Do children at the same age and their parents have a stronger impact on adolescents’ future educational attainment than other neighbours?

Using longitudinal register-based data containing information about the total urban population in Oslo, the whole urban space is studied. The target group was born in 1983 or 1984, living in defined neighbourhoods for a 6-year period, from 11 throughout 16 years of age. The dependent variable is drop-out from upper secondary school at the age of 16 to 18. Individual control variables include sex, ethnicity and parents’ socioeconomic status during childhood and adolescence. The analysis is based on multilevel modeling.