CAREER: Sibling, Cousin and Neighbor Differences in Child Development

SES-9983636道尔顿·康利该学院早期职业发展(Career)资助了一项为期四年的教育和研究计划，该计划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衡量变量，如种族、父母教育、父母职业和收入，作为家庭背景的替代指标。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(即分别是兄弟姐妹、堂兄弟姐妹和邻居)的儿童在健康和发展结果方面的相似性，调查“背景”的影响。家庭内部发展结果的差异与社会分层进程相反，因此，通过了解支配这种差异的模式，我们有可能更好地理解健康和发展不平等代代相传的过程。这项研究试图探索一些相关的问题：(1)哪些特定的发展风险倾向于聚集在家庭内部，哪些更具个体特异性？(2)为什么一些兄弟姐妹、堂兄弟姐妹或童年邻居的发展结果相对相似，而另一些人则表现出巨大的健康和发展差异？(3)考虑到家庭内部的差异，家庭转型如何导致在同一家庭抚养的孩子产生不同的结果？(4)兄弟姐妹如何影响彼此的发育？(5)我们目前的社会经济状况衡量标准如何解释家庭在子女结果方面的差异？(6)大家庭和邻里关系有影响吗？以及(7)家庭环境对孩子的发展最重要吗？关于发展结果(即身体健康状况、心理健康、认知发展和行为问题)的数据将来自收入动态儿童补充小组研究、全国青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。该职业奖项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课程。研究生课程将融合定量方法教学中进行的研究，以使高级统计不那么抽象，更容易为学生所接受。本科生课程将从这笔拨款资助的正在进行的研究中提取材料。也就是说，本课程将介绍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.