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Child Development in the Context of Family and Community Resources: An Agenda...
Pages 27-97

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From page 27...
... Workshop Papers
From page 29...
... Coming from quite different starting points, child development researchers, sociologists, and economists have converged in their needs for rich, multilevel data based on large samples. Beginning from an interest in socioeconomic attainment, sociologists and economists have produced a burgeoning literature on the factors that foster and undermine attainment; they now find themselves needing to delve deeper into the processes labeled socioeconomic status to understand how individual characteristics and family processes interact with community influences to produce socioeconomic attainment.
From page 30...
... This is reflected in plans in the Survey of Income and Program Participation for a new supplemental module on family processes and developmental outcomes, NCES's initiation of a large cohort study of 5-year-olds, and consideration by the National Center for Health Statistics of a 1996 Child and Family Health Survey as part of the National Health Interview Survey. In this paper we suggest specific national data collection projects that could improve research on child and adolescent development.1 Our explicit aim is to encourage continued expansion of both the outcome domains covered and the explanatory variables measured, to enhance the richness and quality of the data obtained, and to improve the representativeness of the samples that are drawn.
From page 31...
... Also, as we discuss, measurement of resources needs to attend to the following: • High-quality, longitudinal measurement of family resources, that is, obtaining measures of a broad range of economic and social resources periodically over the years when a child or adolescent is growing up; • Measures of time "inputs," including the amount of time, the activities engaged in, and the persons present and interacting with a child; • Measurement of family-process mediators, such as communication patterns, disciplinary style, and teaching style; • Multiple levels of measurement, including the child, the family, the school, the community, the neighborhood, and the state; • Measurement of school conditions, such as school organization and the socioeconomic composition of the school; • Exact measurement of intrafamily relationships; and • Measurement of extended-family relationships, including relationships with grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Methodological and sampling considerations are also important, including:
From page 32...
... -- Child Health Supplement 1988; (7) National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 Cohort)
From page 33...
... . The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
From page 34...
... hlthins peer assets move tenure month year National income ppcnflct county Longitudinal source commun state Survey of Youth -- welfare marhist move Child-Mother hlthins biopar Data (NLSY-CM) assets tenure month year National income time neighhd Educational assets activty school Longitudinal multi rules Survey of 1988 commun (NELS88)
From page 35...
... CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND FAMILY AND COMMUNITY RESOURCES 33 Survey Characteristics Special Special Sample Advantages Problems Size Periodicity sibs foster 4,800 Annual, since black institut households 1968 Latino in 1968; 7,900 absparent households in exact 1993 tract sibs nopar 12,686 in 1979 Annual, since black 1979 Latino child exact cheval sibs follow 6,503 children 1986, 88, 90, black foster in 1992 92, 94, Latino institut (biennial) exact unrep cheval Latino foster 24,599 in 1988; 1988, 90, 92, Asian 21,188 in 1992 94, 98 child teach exact sibs institut 2,301 in 1976; 1976, 1981, black 1,147 in 1987 1987 child abspar teach exact cheval
From page 36...
... hlthins assets tenure National Crime income violnce move Victimization hlthins Survey (NCVS) tenure year Decennial Census, income county Public Use Micro- source state Sample (5%)
From page 37...
... CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND FAMILY AND COMMUNITY RESOURCES 35 Survey Characteristics Special Special Sample Advantages Problems Size Periodicity bothpar follow 20,000 households Every 4 absparent institut in 1993 months for exact 30 months sibs sib institut 13,017 households 1987-1988, black in 1987-1988; 1992-1993 Latino 7,926 children child bothpar absparent exact sib foster 58,270 in 1980; 1980, 82, 84 black nopar 24,354 in 1986 86; 1992 Latino (small subteach sample) cheval foster 5,000 households Every quarter institut for 5 quarters sib follow 47,600 households Every 6 child foster in 1990; 9,400 months for bothpar institut children (age 12+)
From page 38...
... and child soccap: social capital measures (e.g., extended kin and community contact(s) rules: house rules for child regarding homework, television watching, bed time, dating, etc.
From page 39...
... zip: zip code level data available, or zip code identified county: county-level characteristics available, or county identified state: state-level data available, or state identified peer: information on peers of child (e.g., characteristics, attitudes) move: residential mobility history Special Advantages sibs: siblings are included in the sample and identified Black: Black oversample Latino: Latino oversample Asian: Asian oversample child: child is surveyed bothpar: both parents are surveyed, if in same household exact: exact relationship of child to all household members is determined tract: tract-level data has been appended to the survey absparent: data on the absent (noncustodial)
From page 40...
... cog/ed cog/ed cog/ed behav behav behav demog demog demog work work work welfare welfare welfare income income income National Longitudinal Survey of prenat health health health (future) (future)
From page 41...
... cog/ed cog/ed behav behav demog demog CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND FAMILY AND COMMUNITY RESOURCES work work welfare income Consumer Expenditure work Surveys (CEX) income 39
From page 42...
... demog work welfare income National Health Interview prenat health health health Survey -- Child Health health behav cog/ed cog/ed Supplement 1988 presch behav behav chcare chcare demog prenat: mother received prenatal care health: health measures, general or specific cog/ed: cognitive ability and educational attainment measures, such as standardized tests, grades, and/or years completed behav: behavioral problems measures (such as the BPI) , delinquent and pro-social activities work: employment information such as usual hours and weeks worked, employment history, and job classifications demog: fertility and marriage data on the child welfare: information on welfare receipt by the child income: income generated by the child presch: preschool measures such as participation, cost, and type and characteristics of program chcare: child care measures such as hours per week, type and characteristics of provider, and costs INTEGRATING FEDERAL STATISTICS ON CHILDREN
From page 43...
... . Types of Family Resources and Interactions Among Resources It is useful to concentrate on four general kinds of resources: financial, time, psychological, and human capital.
From page 44...
... Human capital includes the parents' levels of formal schooling, together with special skills, training, and other characteristics that affect financial or "psychic" income. Psychological resources at the family-system level include characteristics of the parents as well as parenting behavior.
From page 45...
... However, one would expect the addition of extra income to compensate in part for the time constraint. With greater income, from example, parents are able to purchase better-quality child care services.
From page 46...
... These neighborhoods were characterized by stability, supportiveness, and trust -- in other words, they appeared to have high levels of social capital. Overall, however, we know relatively little about how connections to the community promote child well-being.
From page 47...
... For example, in responding to the Social and Motor Development Scale in the 1981 Child Health Supplement of the National Health Interview Survey, mothers with graduate-level educations were more critical of their young children. And teachers in a school attended by children of highly educated parents may be more critical of an average child than a teacher would be who saw the same child in the context of a community with a lower educational level.
From page 48...
... , it is impossible to determine whether a child outcome is due to the resource change or to unmeasured differences between families who did and did not change their circumstances or receive a community resource.2 Thus, direct, longitudinal assessment of child outcomes, using nationally normed tests, represents an important component of any large-scale data collection effort. Measurement of Age-Appropriate Outcomes It is essential to assess child outcomes in ways that are optimal for the age and developmental stage of the child.
From page 49...
... are usually standardized by age. Measurement of Developmental Phases and Transitions Ideally, data collection efforts assessing child outcomes and family resources should be designed to permit estimation of models during and through key developmental phases and transitions.
From page 50...
... Thus surveys should consider measuring outcomes across different domains. High-Quality, Longitudinal Measurement of Family Resources Most theories of child and adolescent development view as important the overall level of family economic resources.
From page 51...
... First, in addition to conventional measures of family socioeconomic status, high-quality measurement of family income is crucial for testing resource-based theories of child and adolescent development. And second, also important is longitudinal measurement of family income, enabling researchers to distinguish between temporary and persistently low levels of family economic resources.
From page 52...
... Measurement of Family Process Family processes or functioning are important to the health and development of children, both in their own right and as mediators of material resources and child outcomes. A recent review of the literature has identified a number of important categories of measures of family processes that affect child well-being, including communication (parent-child and parentparent)
From page 53...
... In either case, however, the proper measurement of family processes, and their inclusion in models relating material resources to child well-being are key to a deeper understanding of the links between material resources and child well-being. Multiple Levels of Measurement Although studies of community influences on human behavior have a long tradition (Park et al., 1967; Wirth, 1956; Shaw and McKay, 1942)
From page 54...
... identifier of sampled addresses is routinely gathered as part of the sampling process.5 It is a simple and inexpensive matter to use these identifiers to merge neighborhood characteristics (e.g., poverty rate, extent of female headship, male joblessness, ethnic composition) from STF3 decennial census data files.
From page 55...
... In several national or multisite studies, response rates to such teacher surveys range between approximately 75 and 80 percent (e.g., National Survey of Children, Moore and Peterson, 1989; Infant Health and Development Program, Brooks-Gunn et al., 1993b; Study of Elementary School Outcomes of Low Birth Weight Children, McCormick et al., 1992)
From page 56...
... . Changes in compliance of noncustodial parents and award of payments as a result of the Family Support Act of 1988 allow for natural experiments, in that one can examine payment levels and contact with children prior to and following changes in the law, as well as state-to-state variations (see McLanahan et al., 1994, who estimated predicted child support for each state to model differences in child support enforcement policy, using data from the Current Population Survey Child Support Supplement)
From page 57...
... There is an added methodological benefit from such information, as illustrated by Gottschalk's (1992) analysis (based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics)
From page 58...
... (1993) follow a similar strategy with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the original National Longitudinal Survey cohorts, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in estimating sisters' differences in adult economic and demographic status as a function of whether a given sister had borne a child during her teenage years.
From page 59...
... (1994) examine the effect of state child support on the economic status of children with absent parents.
From page 60...
... In many research situations, it is unwise to treat Hispanic-Americans as a single group. However, with the exception of the oversampling of Cuban-American and Puerto Ricans in the Hispanic sample of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, none of the national datasets has enough Hispanic-Americans to separate out even the two largest groups: Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans.
From page 61...
... Minimizing Attrition in Longitudinal Surveys The utility of data from all surveys is threatened by nonresponse in
From page 62...
... Some 14 years after its initial interview, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth routinely interviews more than 90 percent of its wave-1 respondents. Some attrition is inevitable even in the best-run longitudinal surveys.
From page 63...
... The PSID contains extensive and detailed information on family material resources; transfer income data are available on a monthly basis. It contains very limited information on family process; however, valuable information is available on family spending patterns.
From page 64...
... National Longitudinal Survey of Youth: Child-Mother Data Surveys of the children of female respondents of the NLSY were begun in 1986 and continue on a biennial basis. Following the NLSY sample frame, there is an oversampling of blacks and Hispanics.
From page 65...
... Data on family material resources are sparse, limited to total family income and assets (parental report)
From page 66...
... Similar questions are often asked of both parents and their children, allowing for interesting comparisons across respondents. Data on family material resources are limited primarily to the year in which the interviews took place, although some retrospective information was obtained in wave 3 regarding welfare receipt and maternal employment patterns.
From page 67...
... Some have been asked of every panel to date; others have been fielded only once or twice. Topics include child care arrangements, child support agreements, functional limitations and disability, utilization of health care services, support for nonhousehold members, and others.
From page 68...
... Thus, while this dataset allows one to look at a child only at two time points, five years apart, it does allow one to analyze in detail the transitions between all adjacent developmental phases, including the transition to early adulthood. Information concerning a household's material resources is very detailed, although the data refer primarily to the status of the household and its members at the time of the survey only.
From page 69...
... is a nationally representative longitudinal survey of high school sophomores and seniors begun in 1980, with biennial follow-ups through 1986. It has a two-stage sampling design.
From page 70...
... . Information on material resources is detailed, covering the amount and sources of income, assets, and tenure, as well as participation in federal social welfare programs.
From page 71...
... Home ownership is also reported; assets and health insurance are not covered. There are no family process data gathered in the census.
From page 72...
... The National Health Interview Survey is currently being redesigned. Current plans call for regular occasional supplements on child health.
From page 73...
... Undoubtedly, decisions to limit the number of children about whom such questions are asked are based on interviewing time constraints. However, we believe that it is far better to have at least some information available on program participation, child care, visitation, and similar activities for all children (and included in those children's own data records)
From page 74...
... The existing family relationship information should be supplemented by asking for the household-listing line number of the natural father or mother of each household member. It would also be desirable to ascertain whether children share the same biological absent parent (for a more detailed discussion, see the recommendations for the decennial census listed below)
From page 75...
... The CEX currently collects great detail on many expenditure categories but has only a single question about child care expenditures. Some details on the type of child care services that were purchased would be desirable.
From page 76...
... A publicly available file such as that produced with the 1970 data would be clearly preferable, but it would be also considerably more expensive to produce because it involves generating new neighborhood-level data rather than using data from identifiable census tracts. A less expensive alternative would be for the Census Bureau to create a file that simply matches existing tract data to household records and make it available to researchers on a restricted basis.
From page 77...
... Expand the income and demographic data collected on all members of the household, which are currently minimal in this survey. Such improvements would include more detailed income and employment data, identification of the exact relationships among all respondents in the household, an expanded Hispanic-origin question to allow for the separate identification of major Hispanic subgroups, and welfare receipt.
From page 78...
... Alternatively, it may be useful to ask retrospective questions of respondents ages 12-17 about incidences of assault or abuse at earlier ages. National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 The NELS88 survey contains many of the characteristics that we have identified as desirable for a dataset to study child and adolescent development.
From page 79...
... National Longitudinal Survey of Youth -- A New Cohort? It appears that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has secured funding for a new set of NLSY cohorts.
From page 80...
... The younger the age range, the less severe are these possible problems. We view sibling-based problems in the NLS samples as important, since sibling observations are a great strength of the data set, and we predict that growing numbers of analysts will rely on the natural experiments inherent in sibling comparisons to control for heterogeneous family effects.
From page 81...
... Information on material resources, family processes, family relationships, and nonresident kin is particularly rich. We make a number of suggestions to improve the organization of existing data: 1.
From page 82...
... Data from the Child Health Supplements to the NHIS have been extensively used by researchers and provide the beginning points for time-series data analysis, if a new supplement is implemented in the next several years. The National Health Interview Survey is currently undergoing a substantial redesign.
From page 83...
... In addition, it is important to collect sociodemographic information specific to the children for whom health data are being collected, such as the exact biological relationship between the child and the parents in the home, contact with the absent parent, insurance coverage for the child including coverage provided by an absent parent, and any transfer income or child support payments made on behalf of that child. The National Center for Health Statistics should adopt questions that will allow researchers to identify exact relationships between each child and their parent(s)
From page 84...
... For analyses of the development of children, however, SIPP currently provides very limited information. To conduct causal analyses of child well-being, data are needed on child outcomes and on the family processes that translate resources into child outcomes.
From page 85...
... Given the rich longitudinal information already being collected with SIPP on income and program participation, the incremental cost involved in adding measures of child outcomes, family processes, time inputs, and social capital is modest relative to the base cost of fielding SIPP. The incremental information will be extremely valuable for developmental research.
From page 86...
... for more than a decade; and the NLSY Hispanic subsample is no longer representative due to heavy in-migration since 1979; (3) SIPP's proposed supplements on child development are ambitious, but the total amount of interviewing time available in the SIPP survey, focused as it is on income and program participation, will never be enough to provide comprehensive measures of outcomes and family process.
From page 87...
... Some 14,000 children could come from this source, with the SIPP core and supplemental questions providing many of the measures we advocate. Although the Census Bureau has shown an increasing willingness to consider questions on child development topics, its attitude regarding the gathering of the sorts of potentially sensitive information that must be part of any new survey of child and adolescent development prevents us from recommending SIPP as the preferred vehicle for such a survey at this time.
From page 88...
... The national survey would provide the quantitative instruments and other procedures; local samples could supplement these data with richer process and contextual data.
From page 89...
... Two of the authors are affiliated with datasets reviewed in this paper: Moore with the National Survey of Children and Duncan with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. In addition, Child Trends, Inc., and Brooks-Gunn are part of a consortium of organizations that have bid to design the Department of Education's Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey.
From page 90...
... Although this analysis-of-variance accounting capability would be quite useful analytically, it is less valuable than and no substitute for the actual decennial census measures matched to the family- and individual-level survey data.
From page 91...
... Grogger 1992 The Economic Consequences of Teenage Childbearing: Results from a Natural Experiment. Paper presented at the National Institute for Child Health and Devel opment Conference on outcomes of early childbearing, Bethesda, Md., May 1992.
From page 92...
... 1988 Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology 94:95-120.
From page 93...
... Effects of maternal employment on cognitive development of 4-year-old children. Demography 26(4)
From page 94...
... Robins, eds. 1994 Child Support Reform and Child Well Being.
From page 95...
... Hill, M 1992 The Panel Study of Income Dynamics: A User's Guide.
From page 96...
... Thomson 1994 Child support enforcement and child well-being: greater security or greater con flict?
From page 97...
... Rutter, M 1985 Family and school influences on cognitive development.


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