8 ASSESSING THE STATE OF THE VILLAGE Multi-method, Multi-level Analyses for Comprehensive Community Change John M. Wallace, Jr., University of Pittsburgh Samantha N. Teixeira, University of Pittsburgh Introduction A growing body of research reveals that “place matters” for the academic, social, emotional and physical health and well-being of children. Consistent with the growth in research, there has also been an increase in programs and social policy that promote “place-based” strategies to address the holistic well-being of poor children. At the federal level, the most prominent recent policy strategies designed to benefit poor children and their families are President Obama’s Promise Neighborhood and Choice Neighborhood initiatives. Motivated, at least in part, by the success of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone (www.hcz.org), Promise Neighborhoods, administered by the Department of Education, focuses on education and schools as primary loci of community development. 1 Choice Neighborhoods, administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, complements Promise Neighborhoods, with a specific focus on housing (i.e., mixed income housing), transportation, public services and job access. 2 Despite the appeal and potential of Promise and Choice Neighborhoods as strategies to impact positively the life chances of poor children, the magnitude of the problem of child poverty coupled with funding restrictions constrain their scope and scale to a few locations around the nation. And so, although these federal placed-based strategies to comprehensively address the needs of poor children have significant potential as demonstration projects and models, they cannot begin to address the problems of the more than 16 million poor children and their families around the nation (Institute for Research on Poverty, 2011). 3 Despite their limitations, however, these federal initiatives appear to have catalyzed other