SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT 1

Outline of Review Article

Title: The correlation between family socioeconomic status and child development.

Introduction

a) Background: the ideas of socioeconomic disparity and child development.

i) Socioeconomic disparity is usually measured through surveying parents' income

levels and educational backgrounds, and establishing whether they fall under the

poverty line.

ii) Child development: the studies include in my annotated bibliography took several

different approaches to quantifying this concept. Many focused on testing the child's

language and vocabulary skill, while others involved IQ tests, math tests, and tests

involving impulse control.

b) An important tension is how the primary research articles differed in the degree of the

correlation observed between socioeconomic status and child development.

i) Some found strong relationships between these two factors, while others observed

weaker correlations, or correlations that were only apparent in certain groups or under

certain conditions.

2) Why is a review necessary now?

a) Income disparities are pronounced in many parts of the world, and educational systems

around the world are in need of new and compelling strategies to best educate young

children.

b) Research on this relationship could help guide pedagogical approaches to help children

from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed alongside their more privileged peers.

Main Analysis
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1) Differences in the observed correlation

a) Studies that posit a strong relationship between family socioeconomic status and child

development.

i) Longitudinal studies show that socioeconomic disadvantage tended to be transmitted

from generation to generation, thereby entrenching inequality.

Fernald et al. 2011, Najman et al. 2004, Rowe 2008, Sohr-Preston et al. 2013.

b) Studies that found weak or no evidence for relationship between family socioeconomic

status and child development.

i) Influence of other factors: some studies found that children with certain advantages

experience the impact of socioeconomic status differently.

(1) Good attention focusing skills mitigate impact of socioeconomic status.

Hassan et al. 2019.

(2) Factors related to socioeconomic level, like parental interaction with children and

family cohesion, might provide a better causal link to child achievement.

Letorneau et al. 2013, Rowe 2008, Sohr-Preston et al. 2013.

ii) Surprising trends

(1) Some studies observed that socioeconomic status improved child development

outcomes in some cases.

(a) Children with lower socioeconomic status demonstrated faster reading growth

between kindergarten and third grade, but those gains were reversed from

third to eighth grade.

Kieffer 2011.
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(2) Family income did not predict cognitive change – in fact, a child’s cognitive score

predicted income gain for the family.

Raffington et al. 2018.

(3) Socioeconomic status strongly influences where children start in development, but

does not have so much of an effect on their educational progress.

Strang and Piasta 2016.

2) Early childhood educational interventions as a means of mitigating inequality.

Fernald et al. 2011, Kieffer 2011, Strang and Piasta 2016.

Conclusion

1) Summary and synthesis of major tensions

a) The community consensus articulated in my literature review is that although

socioeconomic status is associated with child developmental outcomes, the nature and

strength of this linkage remains unclear and requires further study.

i) Some found very strong associations between socioeconomic status and child

development, while others found only weak associations.

b) Most studies also agree that socioeconomic disadvantage tended to be transmitted from

generation to generation, thereby entrenching inequality.

2) State of this research

a) Lack of generalizability

i) Just about all the primary studies were limited in being drawn from samples not

representative of the general population. Most samples were mostly white and middle

class.

ii) Longitudinal studies also suffered from participants dropping over time.
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Kieffer 2011, Najman et al. 2014, Raffington et al. 2018, Rowe 2008, and Sohr-

Preston et al. 2013.

b) Lack of causality

i) Most studies so far have been correlational in nature, as it is hard to establish an

ethical experimental manipulation when the test subjects are human children.

ii) Possible manipulations include child developmental outcomes when a new law has

been implemented, impacting a community's socioeconomic landscape.

Duncan et al. 2017.

3) Projections for further research

a) Gendered differences in child development

i) What differences exist in the development of boys versus girls? To what extent are

these differences due to nature and nurture? How do socioeconomic factors play into

the development of girls versus boys?

Hassan et al. 2019, Sohr-Preston et al. 2013.

b) Cultural differences in child development

i) How does poverty affect children in a community and country that is systematically

poor?

Fernald et al. 2011.

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References

Duncan, Greg J., et al. (2017). Moving Beyond Correlations in Assessing the Consequences of

Poverty. The Annual Review of Psychology, 68(68), pp. 10.1-10.22

Fernald, L. C., Weber, A., Galasso, E., Ratsifandrihamanana, L. (2011). Socioeconomic

gradients and child development in a very low income population: Evidence from

Madagascar. Developmental Science, 14(4), pp. 832-847.

Hassan, R., Mills, A. S., Day, K. L., Van Lieshout, R. J., Schmidt, L. A. (2019). Relations among

Temperament, Familial Socioeconomic Status, and Inhibitory Control in Typically

Developing Four-Year-Old Children. Journal of Child and Family Studies, pp. 1-9.

Kieffer, M. J. (2011). Before and after third grade: Longitudinal evidence for the shifting role of

socioeconomic status in reading growth. Reading and Writing, 25(7), pp. 1725-1746.

Letourneau, N. L., Duffett-Leger, L., Levac, L., Watson, B., Young-Morris, C. (2013).

Socioeconomic status and child development: A meta-analysis. Journal of Emotional and

Behavioral Disorders, 21(3), pp. 211-224.

Najman, J. M., Aird, R., Bor, W., O’Callaghan, M., Williams, G. M., Shuttlewood, G. J. (2004).

The generational transmission of socioeconomic inequalities in child cognitive

development and emotional health. Social Science & Medicine, 58(6), pp. 1147-1158.

Raffington, L., Prindle, J. J., Shing, Y. L. (2018). Income gains predict cognitive functioning

longitudinally throughout later childhood in poor children. Developmental Psychology,

54(7), pp. 1232-1243.

Rowe, M. L. (2008). Child-directed speech: Relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of

child development and child vocabulary skill. Journal of Child Language, 35(1), pp. 185-

205.
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Sohr-Preston, S. L., Scaramella, L. V., Martin, M. J., Neppl, T. K., Ontai, L., Conger, R. (2013).

Parental socioeconomic status, communication, and children's vocabulary development:

A third‐generation test of the family investment model. Child Development, 84(3), pp.

1046-1062.

Strang, T. M. and Piasta, S. B. (2016). Socioeconomic differences in code-focused emergent

literacy skills. Reading and Writing, 29(7), pp. 1337-1362.