3-014 - Dynamic Measures of Risk and Child Development: Exploring Turbulence, Trajectories, and Profiles of Risk.

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Explorations of poverty-related risk traditionally incorporate static, population-level measures of adversity and child outcomes. Such research masks variability in risk exposure and fails to capture the complex interactions that occur between environments and individuals over time. The current symposium explores the impacts that poverty-related adversity has on one sample of low-income children using a complementary set of dynamic and person-centered methods and approaches.

All papers employ data from the Chicago School Readiness Project, a preschool social-emotional intervention conducted in Head Start centers during 2004/2005 with subsequent follow-ups through 2013. Longitudinal and contextually rich measures within this data set provides us the opportunity to operationalize poverty and child outcomes in multiple ways, including evaluations of turbulence (paper 1), trajectories (paper 2), and profiles (paper 3) of risk. By focusing on a single sample of children but employing different approaches these papers collectively provide an important “case study” for researchers interested in poverty-related risk.

Paper 1 examines whether turbulence among risk indicators relates to child academic outcomes beyond average levels of cumulative risk using growth curve analyses and multivariate OLS/logistic regression. Paper 2 examines the impacts of early exposure to socioeconomic risk across three contexts (home, school, and neighborhood), on child behavior problem trajectories using parallel process latent growth curve analysis. Paper 3 examines relationships between profiles of family income trajectories and child functioning at the end of elementary school using growth mixture models. Finally, our discussant will discuss the collective implications of this body of work for measurement, methodology, and practice.

Sub Unit

• Methods, History, Theory

Chair

• Emily Pressler, New York University

Discussant

• Kathleen M Ziol-Guest, New York University

Individual Presentations

• Poverty-Related Risk: Turbulence and Children’s Academic Success at the Transition to Middle School - Presenting Author: Emily Pressler, New York University; Allison Hope Friedman-Krauss, New York University; Cybele Raver, New York University; Amanda Roy, University of Illinois-Chicago

• Exploring Early Exposure to Family, School, and Neighborhood Poverty and Developmental Trajectories of Problem Behavior - Presenting Author: Dana Charles McCoy, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Stephanie M Jones, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Cybele Raver, New York University; Jessica D Burdick, New York University; Lauren Y Hay, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Income Trajectories and Children’s Behavior Problems and Self-Regulatory Skills - Presenting Author: Amanda Roy, University of Illinois-Chicago; Emily Pressler, New York University