CAREER: Sibling, Cousin and Neighbor Differences in Child Development

这项教师早期职业发展（Career）资助了一项为期四年的教育和研究项目，该项目利用亲属关系模型调查家庭背景对儿童发展的动态影响。评估社会力量对儿童健康和发展的影响的传统社会学方法依赖于一些可测量的变量，如种族、父母教育、父母职业和收入，作为家庭背景的代理。这些项目将研究另一种方法——通过比较来自同一家庭、大家庭和社区出身（分别是兄弟姐妹、表兄弟姐妹和邻居）的儿童在健康和发展结果方面的相似性来调查“背景”的影响。家庭内部发展结果的差异为社会分层过程提供了相反的事实，因此，通过了解支配这种差异的模式，我们可能更好地了解健康和发展不平等代代相传的过程。该研究试图探索一些相关的问题：(1)哪些特定的发育风险倾向于在家庭中聚集，哪些是更具体的个人风险？(2)为什么有些兄弟姐妹、表亲或童年邻居的发展结果相对相似，而另一些则表现出巨大的健康和发展差异？(3)考虑到这种家庭内部差异，家庭转型如何导致在同一家庭中长大的孩子的不同结果？(4)兄弟姐妹如何影响彼此的发展？(5)我们目前对社会经济地位的衡量标准如何能很好地解释家庭对儿童结果的差异？(6)大家庭和邻里是否有影响？(7)在什么年龄，家庭环境对儿童发展最重要？有关发展结果的数据（即身体健康状况、心理健康、认知发展和行为问题）将从收入动态小组研究儿童补充、全国青少年母子纵向调查链接数据文件和全国青少年健康纵向调查中进行分析。该职业奖的教育部分包括开发两门新课程，一门研究生课程和一门本科生课程。研究生课程将整合定量方法教学中正在进行的研究，使高级统计学不那么抽象，更易于学生理解。本科课程将从这项资助下正在进行的研究中提取材料。也就是说，该课程将提供关于家庭背景对儿童发展、教育成功和成人社会经济地位的影响的理论和数据。

SES-9983636Dalton ConleyThis Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant funds a four year education and research program that investigates the dynamic impact of family background on child development using kinship models. Traditional sociological approaches to assessing the impact of social forces on child health and development rely on a number of measured variables such as race, parental education, parental occupation and income as proxies for family background. The projects will examine an alternate approach--investigating the impact of "background" through comparing the similarity in health and development outcomes among children from the same family, extended family, and community origin (i.e., siblings, cousins and neighbors, respectively). Intra-family differences in developmental outcomes provide the counter-factual to processes of social stratification, so by understand the patterns that governs such differences, we can potentially better understand the process by which health and developmental inequality is transmitted across generations. The study seeks to explore a number of related questions: (1) what specific developmental risks tend to cluster within families and which are more individually specific?, (2) why are the developmental outcomes of some sets of siblings, cousins or childhood neighbors relatively similar, while others demonstrate great health and developmental disparities?, (3) given such intra-family differences, how do family transitions lead to different outcomes for children reared in the same household?, (4) how do siblings affect each other's development?, (5) how well do our current measures of social economic status explain between family differences in child outcomes?, (6) does extended family and neighborhoods have an influence?, and (7) at what age is the family environment the most important for child development?Data on developmental outcomes (i.e., physical health status, mental health, cognitive development and behavioral problems will be analyzed from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Supplement, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Mother-Child linked data file, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health.The educational component of this CAREER award includes developing two new courses, one graduate and one undergraduate. The graduate course will merge the research being conducted in the teaching of quantitative methods to make advanced statistics less abstract and more accessible to student. The undergraduate course will draw its material from the ongoing research funded by this grant. That is, the course will present theories and data on the impact of family background on child development, educational success and adult socio-economic status.