Friday, 14 January 2005 - 2:00 PM

This presentation is part of: Adolescent Mental Health

Factors Affecting Child Cognitive Achievement: A Multilevel Analysis of the PSID-CDS

Purpose: The literature suggests that individuals can break out of intergenerational poverty cycles but perhaps to a lesser extent than commonly believed. It suggests that escape from poverty depends on numerous factors including education, employment opportunities in adulthood, parental or neighborhood models, familial and child's aspiration, a child's position within a family and when in a child's poverty occurs. Thus, for example, Corcoran (1995) finds that overall parental resources play a profound role in influencing children's subsequent income and employment outcomes, but that factors such as parental education or teenage pregnancy exert an influence on children over and over relating income. Using 1997 Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (CDS-PSID), this study examines how much factors associated with resources available to children and family influence children's cognitive achievement.

Methods: The 1968-1997 annual data of core PSID were employed to reconstruct family histories for all study children. This study examined the total and four subscales of Woodcock-Johnson Revised Tests of Achievement collected by CDS-PSID. A propensity score matching method was used to reduce the bias of differences between welfare recipients and non welfare recipients and make the two groups more similar in their demographic backgrounds. The sample comprised 692 children who resided in 434 families. A multi-level framework was employed to investigate the effects of a similar phenomenon (e.g., welfare use) at more than one level of aggregation (e.g., primary caregiver welfare use). Key level 1 predictors included age, race, gender, and child percentage of time using welfare from birth. Key level 2 predictors included PCG's age, education, income, length of time using welfare in his or her age 6 to 12, self-esteem/efficacy, parenting attitudes and opinions and household measures of neighborhood resources.

Results: Effects of being black were negatively related to all outcome variables. Primary caregiver education was positively related to all outcome variables. The child's age was only significant in applied problem score and the significance of child use of welfare from birth disappeared in calculation and applied problems. Intergenerational poverty did not have negative effect on child outcome through the analysis when it measured with primary caregiver education. This suggests that education mitigated negative effects of poverty on child outcomes. Interaction between race and education was further tested in the analysis, but it indicated no interaction and the effects of race and primary caregiver education remained almost the same.

Implications: From the analysis, it is clear that the effect of primary caregiver education persists in child cognitive achievement, when controlled other variables such as child characteristics, family characteristics and other neighborhood related variables. This finding affirms that there is generally a high association between parents' education and children's achievement. This study also reveals, minority children have lower achievement. It also affirms that in general, minority children also experience much less favorable educational outcomes. Through public policy, social intervention and community development targeted to human capital and racial gap will be an addition to development of children as well as alleviating poverty.

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